Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Entity Framework CTP 4 Walkthrough

CTP 4 of the entity framework enhancements were released yesterday for review.  I have just started looking at the entity framework as a potential ORM solution for my latest project Worship.  I need an offline database and after looking at MS SQL CE and SQL Lite have opted for SQL Lite due to its smaller assembly size and larger feature set.  One problem i found with the original entity framework is that the designer did not support inheritance very well.  EF itself does support all 3 types of inheritance, but i found the designer lacking and had to resort to editing the XML manually to implement TPT inheritance which is what i wanted to use.  The new CTP of the entity framework has much better support for code driven development of the database model and much simplified use, so im pretty excited about trying it out and will write more on my experiences.  For now, read this post to get a nice overview of the improvements and how they can be used.

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