[I haven’t done QandAs for a long while – very remiss of me.] Anyway, I have been asked this one so many times lately that I felt a more public answer was needed. The short answer is: Mostly. Certainly it is good enough to get work done. The longer answer is below… History In the first version of Entity...

The current situation is roughly: The majority of PCs have a version of the .NET Framework A fair number of PCs do not have the .NET Framework A fair number of PCs have .NET Framework 1.1 A lot more PCs have .NET Framework 2.0 A lot of PCs have .NET Framework 3.0 In comparison, relatively few (bare in...

This one has come up a few times. LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities in V1 do not currently support the newest types added to SQL Server 2008 nor do they support your own User Defined Types. More specifically: LINQ to SQL does not support the hierarchyID, geospatial, table or time types. UDTs are not supported...

It is great that so many folks have started investigating Data Services and the Entity Framework as a result of the MSDN events we have been delivering. Which does also mean I keep getting asked “Why doesn’t mine work?” kind of questions. The good news is the team did a comprehensive post to help you...

ADO.NET Data Service gives you the ability to do: Read/Write with ADO.NET Entity Framework Read only with LINQ to SQL The reason it is read only for LINQ to SQL is that Data Services needs to object model that it is exposing to implement IUpdatable. LINQ to SQL does not. There is a solution...

This question has come up a couple of times in the last few weeks as developers move to Visual Studio 2008 but need to continue to work on Visual Studio 2005 projects. The good news is we have a comprehensive solution for this thanks to the Code Analysis/FxCop team. However to use this you either need...

One thing I like to get across when I talk about the ADO.NET Entity Framework is that in V1 the Designer does not support all the capabilities of the underlying Entity Data Model (EDM) – and hence you will sometimes need to “roll up your sleeves” and start editing the underlying XML files (CSDL, MSL...

This question from one of my MSDN sessions has stumped me for a while. I know the new language features in Visual Studio 2008 (e.g. LINQ!) are compiler magic which ultimately spits out CLR 2.0 code – but what about the supporting assemblies? Hence… I parked it. Then… I stumble across a solution. LINQBridge...

This one has come up for both LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. The scenario is a reasonably common one. How to handle something like this: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[ReturnMultipleRS] AS select * from customers select * from products LINQ to SQL: The solution is to add a method to the...

I keep getting asked this one. I have my own way of answering which ultimately ends up with “LINQ to Entities is the right choice for majority of scenarios, just expect a little pain”. In slightly more detail: If you only care about SQL Server AND you have complete control of the “shape” of the db schema...