Entity Framework Design

Over the last year we’ve seen a marked increase in traffic on the ADO.NET blog , which has encouraged us to use it for all our announcements and discussions. Today we are officially retiring the Entity Framework Design Blog, although we remain committed...

One of the most highly-requested features for the Entity Framework is first-class support for Enums, and we are happy to provide support for this feature in the Entity Designer in the June 2011 CTP recently released. If you haven’t checked it out...

When you write a LINQ to Entities query today, the Entity Framework walks over the expression tree generated by the C#/VB compiler and translates (or compiles) that into SQL. Compiling the expression tree into SQL involves some overhead though...

We recently shipped Entity Framework 4.1 , and it has been exciting to see the reception the new Code First and DbContext APIs have been getting in the developer community. What is also exciting is to be able to start talking more about other features...

One of the highly-anticipated features coming in the next version of Entity Framework is Spatial support. We’d like to give you a look at the experience of developing with Spatial types in the Entity Designer. If you haven’t already, take...

Pedro Ardila Normal Pedro Ardila 2 5 2011-05-04T21:47:00Z 2011-05-04T21:47:00Z 2 1238 7060 Microsoft Corporation 58 16 8282 14.00 Clean Clean false false...

Update: this feature has been postponed and will not be included in Entity Framework 5. Unique Constraints in the Entity Framework We’ve been busy working on enabling unique constraints in the Entity Framework. Unique Constraints allow you...

One of the key features coming in the next release of Entity Framework is Table-Valued Function support. It is a very popular customer request and we have been working diligently to design a solution that we hope you find simple, yet useful. This design...

Back in July we released the latest preview of Code First and we’ve been receiving a lot of feedback that is helping us shape this feature. One of the top asks we are hearing is for a solution that will evolve the database schema as your object...

The team has been quietly working on a number of improvements to the entity designer that we would like to show off and get feedback on. This particular set of features is targeted at making modeling more productive and scalable, and models themselves...

The information in this post is out of date. Visit msdn.com/data/ef for the latest information on current and past releases of EF. For WPF Data Binding see http://msdn.com/data/jj574514 For WinForms Data Binding see http://msdn.com/data/jj682076...

Background We’ve been hearing a lot of good feedback on the recently released update to the Entity Framework in .NET 4. This release marks a significant advancement from the first release that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1. I’m not going to...

The latest preview of Code First allows you to describe a model using C# or VB.Net classes. The basic shape of the model is detected by convention and then a fluent API can be used to further refine your model. We recently posted about our plans to...

The first release of Entity Framework shipped in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008. Since then, we have been focused on incorporating your feedback and enabling the scenarios that you wanted us to work on. The feedback we have received through...

Data annotation attributes were introduced in .NET 3.5 as a way to add validation to classes used by ASP.NET applications. Since that time , RIA Services has begun using data annotations and they are now part of Silverlight .  Code First allows you...

We recently released an updated version of the POCO template that works with Visual Studio 2010 RC on the Visual Studio Gallery. In this post we will delve into the various possible code generation options for future releases of the POCO template. We...

We’ve come a long way since the last post on Code-Only . So it’s high time for another update. We’ve been working really hard on Code-Only revving the design, and spotting missing capabilities and responding to feedback both internal and external etc...

As part of the first previews of Code-Only we shared some code to create a database: // Create a context using code-only using (var mycontext = builder.Create(dbConnection)) {     // Create the database if it doesn’t already exist    ...

Many customers have asked us how to port a LINQ to SQL application to the Entity Framework. In order to make this process easier, we have developed a metadata conversion template. This template converts LINQ to SQL metadata (.dbml) to metadata compatible...

We've been working hard on Code Only since the first preview . In the next release you will be able to specify: Navigation Property Inverses. Property Facets, like Nullability , MaxLength , Precision etc. Property to Column mappings Type...

There are currently two ways to get Entity Framework apps up and running, we call these Database First and Model First respectively. Database First has been with us since .NET 3.5 SP1, and involves reverse engineering an Entity Data Model from an existing...

Background One of the biggest pieces of feedback we received from the N-Tier Improvements for Entity Framework post as well as other sources was: “low level APIs are great, but where is the end-to-end architecture for N-tier and the Entity Framework...

Background A number of months ago we asked whether Foreign Keys (FKs) in Conceptual and Object models were important. The feedback we got indicated that there are a real mix of opinions on the topic. Some people are all for them while others think...

When VS 2010 ships it will include some significant improvements to our code generation story for the Entity Framework. The basic idea is to make use of T4 templates for code generation and ship strong integration into the Entity Framework Designer to...

A while back I wrote a post that introduced the concept of Computed Properties . Since that time we’ve had a number of conversations with both customers and internal partners and we’ve had some new ideas, that have changed our thinking somewhat. ...