Tool Time

The ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer Extension Starter Kit

2009-11-19T17:26:00Z

The Entity Designer in VS 2010 has a number of new extensibility points. If you are interested in writing extensions for the designer, you should definitely check out the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer Extension Starter Kit over on Code Gallery.

When you download the starter kit, you will be downloading a VSIX file. Save this to your PC and then double-click on it to install a new project template. Open VS 2010 and choose to create new project based on this template.

There are a number of stub classes that get dropped into the project by default that you can either embrace and extend, or just use as references when adding your own classes. The project itself has some nice tools to make your life easier, such as integration with the build process to automatically create a VSIX from your project.

New Open Data Protocol Visualizer

2009-11-18T17:27:00Z

Yesterday, we announced the availability of the Open Data Protocol Visualizer. This installs from the Visual Studio Gallery and provides visualization for any WCF Data Service (a.k.a. ADO.NET Data Services, a.k.a. Astoria).

This is an exciting release for the Data Tools team!

Model & Code Generation Uncovered

2009-06-10T21:57:00Z

Last summer, the senior developer on the Entity Designer team (Mike Kaufman) wrote a series of blog posts over on the ADO.NET team blog about how the designer uses the public APIs found in System.Data.Entity.Design.dll to do its model generation and code generation. He writes about the file formats used by the designer and the runtime, explains how EdmGen.exe uses these same APIs and talks about a project that he has on Code Gallery (EdmGen2) that is able to read and write EDMX files.

These are worth a read if you haven't seen them yet.

Part 1 : Discussion on the file formats
Part 2 : Model and code generation
Part 3 : Validation
Part 4 : Details on Mike's comand-line tool, EdmGen2

Keyboarding in the Entity Designer

2009-05-21T19:21:00Z

I have heard quite a few folks ask questions about how to use their keyboard more when using the Entity Designer. Many people can be more productive if they are able to use more of the keyboard (reduce mouse clicks). Fortunately, Visual Studio has ways to make keyboarding easier. In addition, the Entity Designer has its own built-in keyboarding support. Finally, the DSL Toolkit (the component that provides the boxes-and-lines Entity canvas) also has built-in keyboarding support.

Let's start with the DSL Toolkit. This component has a number of nice keyboarding options discussed by Garethj over on his blog. These keyboard shortcuts can be used when the Entity canvas is currently selected. I will make note of one in particular which is the INS key. If you select either the "Scalar Properties" compartment header, or a Property itself and hit the INS key, it will add a new Property to the Entity.

Next, let's cover VS keyboarding. Each menu item in every Entity Designer context menu is treated as a Visual Studio "command" and you can assign your own keyboard shortcut to it. Just click on the Tools menu, then Options. Under Environment, choose Keyboard. Scroll down the list in the middle until you see "OtherContextMenus.MicrosoftDataEntityDesignContext". Here you will see the list of commands that you can create keyboard shortcuts to. Let's map some keystrokes for creating a new entity and a new scalar property.

Select OtherContextMenus.MicrosoftDataEntityDesignContext.Add.Entity

Place your cursor into the "Press shortcut keys" text box
Type, Ctrl-E twice
Click Assign

Select OtherContextMenus.MicrosoftDataEntityDesignContext.Add.ScalarProperty

Place your cursor into the "Press shortcut keys" text box
Type, Ctrl-E then Ctrl-P
Click Assign

Now, open up a blank EDMX model. Type Ctrl-E, Ctrl-E and you should see the New Entity dialog. Type the Enter key to accept. Now, type ">" to move into the shape (using hints from Gareth's post above). Type Ctrl-E, Ctrl-P to add a new scalar property. You can expand on this, defining the keyboard shortcuts that make the most sense to you and that help you be productive.

Finally, the Entity Designer has some custom keyboarding defined in the Mapping Details window. To try this out, open an EDMX file that has a number of entities and mappings (or quickly reverse engineer a model from your database). Use this sequence to change focus to the Mapping Details window:

Type the Home key
Type the Tab key to move through the entities until you find the one you want to edit mappings for
Type the Context Menu key, then type "M" to use the keyboard accelerator to show the Mapping Details window (if you keyboard doesn't have the special context menu key, then you can use the technique above to create a new shortcut for that command)

Now that the Mapping Details window is shown, hitting Tab will switch between the main window area and the toolbar on the left:

If you have the toolbar highlighted, you can use the arrow keys to move between the buttons and the Enter or Space key to select one
If you are in the main window area

Use your arrow keys to move up and down the rows, or right and left across the columns
If you have a cell selected that has a drop down list, hit Alt-[Down Arrow] to drop down the list
Once a list is show, use the arrow keys to scroll up and down, Enter to select or Esc to cancel

Happy keyboarding!

First Post

2009-05-20T22:36:00Z

Starting a new blog today, hoping to spend some time talking about Entity Framework Tooling and other topics.