Diego Vega : Entity Framework Toolkits & Extensions

Jarek publishes his excellent Entity Framework POCO Adapter

divega — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:50:06 GMT

I have been back from vacation for some time but I haven't had time to post anything (i.e. I was on vacation the day Entity Framework went RTM in .NET 3.5 SP1!).

Finally, something happened that I cannot wait to talk about.

Jarek and I went discussing how persistence ignorant classes could be supported by building a layer on top of the EF v1 API for a long time.

He finally figured out a good way to do it. The result is this sample that wraps Entity Framework APIs and uses simple code-generation to create "adapters" and "proxies" for your POCO classes:

Entity Framework POCO Adapter

You can read Jarek's blog post explaining it all.

We hope people will find it interesting and will send useful feedback that can help us improve the core product.

Entity Framework Extensions Project Update

divega — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:10:47 GMT

Just a couple of links:

Colin posted a refresh today today that is compatible with .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta and includes some optimizations for the materializer using dynamic methods. Here is his post about it.

Entity Framework Extensions (EFExtensions) Project available in CodeGallery

divega — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:44:00 GMT

When I announced the start of the Entity Framework Toolkits & Extensions section in CodeGallery, Colin already had a big chunk of what he is now making available in the works. And so I had it in my mind when I defined the Entity Framework Toolkits & Extensions as a collection of source code and tools to augment EF's capabilities and extend its reach to new scenarios.

It took Colin 2 months to get some free time (readying a product for release is no easy task), to write some extra functionality (the custom materializer was first introduced a couple of weeks ago) and to get his code properly reviewed, etc.

I would like to recommend you to go and download EFExtensions from the project page at CodeGallery, and then enjoy Colin's first blog post explaining some of the stuff the current EFExtensions are good for.

By the way, one of my my favorite parts of the project is the EntitySet class and its GetTrackedEntities() method :)

Alex already introduced Colin as one super smart colleague. In fact, I cannot stress enough how smart Colin is. He is the uber developer. But I must add that intelligence is not his only quality!

Please, send us feedback on this. The most straightforward way is to use the Discussion tool in CodeGallery, but feel free to use the email links in our blogs.

And expect some really cool new EF Tools & Extensions form Colin and other members of the team. I know what I am talking about! :)

EFContrib: An Entity Framework Community Contribution Project

divega — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:19:38 GMT

I got the news today that Ruurd Boeke, a member of the developer community, has created an Entity Framework Contrib project in CodePlex. The project home is:

http://www.codeplex.com/efcontrib

The initial goal sounds like a good idea, but overall I am just very happy to see an EF Contrib project starting and I hope it will be very successful and why not, famous :)

Evidently, I cannot talk for the owner of the project, but since in his own blog post he is inviting people to contact him or leave comments:

If you are another member of the community and you planned or wished to contribute your ideas on how to extend the Entity Framework capabilities in such a community project, I encourage you to check it out and contact Ruurd and see what happens.

Welcome to the Entity Framework Toolkits & Extensions

divega — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:31:00 GMT

Today we went live with something very dear to me: The Entity Framework Toolkits & Extensions. This is a collection of source code libraries and design time tools created to augment the ways you can use the Entity Framework.

We distribute them under the Microsoft Public License, and it lives in the ADO.NET Entity Framework & LINQ to Relational Data Portal at the MSDN Code Gallery.

The purpose of putting this collection together is to showcase the ways to address new scenarios with the Entity Framework, but also to create a very tight feedback loop between the members of our team and the Developer Community.

You can think of our Tools and Extensions as things we just couldn't resist to build, but also stuff we hope you will find super useful.

Right now the list is short (but certainly not modest):

eSqlBlast is Zlatko's Interactive Entity SQL tool and libraries.
Perseus is Danny's entity graph serialization classes for WCF services.

And on the samples section:

Sample EDMX Code Generator ~~Asad's~~ Sanjay's EDMX code generation learning tool.

Of course, we have more in the works!

Update: I first took the Sample EDMX Code Generation as something Asad has been working on. Oops! You can read more about about Sanjay's sample here and here.