Continue reading »]]> Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Beta 2 has now been released to members of MSDN, with a public download available from Wednesday.

Beta 2 brings many improvements to the table, including improvements in Sharepoint, WPF, ASP.NET, WinForms, as well as improvements to the core IDE and testing tools. I saw some of these IDE improvements at an event with Scott Gu in Manchester a couple of weeks ago and they look pretty cool.

Visual Studio now comes in several flavours, namely Premium, Professional and Ultimate and the good news is that TFS 2010 comes out of the box with all three.  Apparently it only takes 20 minutes to setup source control, bug and issue tracking and automated build with it.

Finally, another great piece of news is that this release also ships with a Go-live license, so this can be used for production projects if you wish

If you are a member of MSDN and want to download the beta now, you can get it from here.

For more information on the release visit Scott Gu’s blog where you he has started a series of posts on the new features in 2010 Beta 2.

Have any of you been using Beta 1? Will you be using Beta 2? What do you think of the way 2010 and .Net 4.0 are shaping up?

Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, beta 2, visual studio 2010, vs2010

Continue reading »]]> There has been a lot of information being passed around recently about the changes being introduced in the second major release of Microsoft’s Entity Framework, so I thought it might be a good idea to get a list of articles together on the subject that I have found useful.

If you know of any more good articles you have found yourself, let me know!

Enjoy!

The ADO.Net Entity Framework (2010) (MSDN) – If you don’t know or are unsure of what the Entity Framework is, then this might be a good place to start.  It provides a good overview with links to more articles going into details in specific areas.

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What’s New In Entity Framework 4 (Slides) – For those of you who are familiar with the first version of the Entity Framework in .Net 3.5 SP1, but have not yet delved into the next release, these slides give an overview of what has changed and what has been introduced.

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TUTORIAL: Model First using Entity Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 – This is a tutorial I wrote a while back for those with the Visual Studio 2010 beta who wanted to see the new model first functionality introduced in EF v2.

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Entity Framework v2 and Data Access Architecture Best Practices – Some design patterns and development style discussion for when using the EF v2 and Visual Studio 2010.

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N-Tier Application Patterns with Entity Framework v2 – A good article regarding designing N-Tier applications with EF v2, using .Net Framework 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF.

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Multiple Database Support in Entity Framework 4 – Interesting article discussing the database independence being introduced with the Entity Framework.

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BOOK: Professional ADO.Net 3.5 With LINQ and the Entity Framework - I am currently reading this book which tackles ADO.Net 3.5 with the Entity Framework.  Whilst this is not specifically for version 2, this seems to be a good into the the EF and worth a look if you are new to the subject.

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Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, ef 4, ef v2, Entity Framework

Continue reading »]]> I have used the entity framework in a few projects using .Net 3.5, but we were promised that there was much more to come in the next version which is shipping with .Net 4.0 and with quite a few announcements recently from the ADO.NET Team, I thought I would summarise and provide some links (at the bottom of the post) for you to get some more detailed info if you are interested.

Model First

This is something that I am really excited about and something that has long been needed IMHO.

In .Net 3.5 you could take a database and generate your entity framework model from it.  In .Net 4.0 , however, it is possible to create your model first and then generate DDL for creating your database from your model. 

This is all fantastic and I can see me using this method alot, but whats even better is the fact that you will also have the ability to customise the DDL generation step yourself to suit your own needs.  For example, the default generation would be to generate a table per entity type, but you may have several entity classes that inherit from a parent class and in this instance you may want to modify the generator to produce a table per hierarchy structure for your database.

Deferred Loading

One of the things that people wish was available in the Entity Framework is deferred loading as it is in Linq to SQL. Well, now thanks to the ADO.Net team listening to the feedback, it is.  Previously, if you had a Customer object that contained Orders for each customer, you needed to explicitly call a Load method on the Customer object to be able to use the Order objects associated with it.

Now though, the following is possible;

using (NorthwindEntities db = new NorthwindEntities())
{
    db.ContextOptions.DeferredLoadingEnabled = true;

    foreach (Customer c in db.Customers)
    {
        if (c.Orders.Count > 10)
        {
            SendLoyaltyRewardToCustomer(c);
        }
    }
}

In the simple example above, you will notice that you do not need to explicitly load any Orders, but simply set the DeferredLoadingEnabled flag to true (this is off by default, but apparently there are ways to change this).

General Entity Framework Improvements

The following is a list from a recent post on the ADO.Net Team Blog of other key improvements coming to the Framework in this version;

1. 1. Development Approaches
      1. Model First development –  We’ve added functionality to the ADO.NET Entity Data Model designer to start from a Model and then have T-SQL and customized code generated.
      2. Testing applications that use the Entity Framework – Along with the patterns above we’ve added an interface, along with guidance, that enables better testability of applications that use the Entity Framework.

      Architectural Concerns

      1. Persistence Ignorance – Enabling developers to use their own classes without needing to introduce interfaces or other elements specific to the Entity Framework.
      2. Applications Patterns – Discussing patterns like the Repository and UnitOfWork patterns with guidance on how to use them with the Entity Framework
      3. Building N-Tier applications with the Entity Framework – Adding API’s and templates that make building N-Tier applications with the Entity Framework much easier.

      Entity Framework Improvements

      1. Customization of Code Generation – Integration with the ADO.NET Entity Framework Designer and T4 Templates in Visual Studio to provide developer controlled code generation.
      2. Small things that make development of applications simpler – Adding things like Pluralization and Singularlization in the model, lazy loading, and more stored procedure mapping make building applications that use the Entity Framework much easier.
      3. Customizing Queries – Adding support for existing LINQ operators, recognizing a larger set of patterns with LINQ, writing model defined functions along with the ability to use these in LINQ, and a number of other ways to create and customize queries.
      4. SQL Generation Readability Improvements – Improving the readability, along with TSQL performance optimizations, of the generated queries to make it much easier to understand what is happening
      5. And much, much more

Useful Links

The ADO.Net team have said that they have many mroe detailed posts on the way in the next couple of weeks so it’s well worth keeping an eye on their blog.  Plus, we should soon see a beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 which should contain some of the aforementioned features.  I will be posting here when that’s released so keep an eye out for that.

ADO.Net Team Blog Post regarding Deferred Loading

ADO.Net Team Blog Post reagrding Model First in EF

ADO.Net Team Blog

Technorati Tags: .NET 4.0, ADO.NET, eneity framework