Those of you that are interested in EF probably know by now by now that if you wanted to start playing around the new features of EF like POCO entities, Self tracking Entities and Code Only EF, you had to download and install EF4FeatureCTP2.exe. Unfortunately the second CTP which was released last November, the update for Visual Studio 2010, was released without the POCO Template (the new code generation mechanism for EF relies on T4 mechanism) and raised a lot of debate and comments from developers.  Last week though the EF Team announced the Entity Framework POCO Template...

It’s been quite some time since I last talked about Entity Framework Caching. Since then a lot of people has come to me asking me if there was something they could do. Well I’m happy to announce that this week Jaroslaw Kowalski released the source code on msdn code library of sample caching providers ASP.Net Cache, and Velocity on) for Entity Framework. The solution relies on caching the raw query results (result set) so all of the problems described earlier in my previous post go away and caching becomes transparent for the client. I only wish we could have something like that in...

One of the great advantages offered by Entity Framework compared to Linq to SQL is the fact that it is designed to support any database not just MS SQL. All you need to have in order to connect to third party databases is the right ADO.NET provider. Unfortunately till recently there were no implementations of such providers. Devart (formerly Core Lab) though, has released a new version of their ADO.NET providers, which includes support for the Entity Framework. So with DevArt's new ADO.NET providers you'll be able to connect to Oracle, MySQL, and Postgress using Entity Framework.

I've been working and am a huge supporter of Microsoft's Entity Framework. That doesn't mean that I haven't found issues that prevented me from tackling requirements of the day to day challenges faced when building real-world applications and services. I always thought that if only I had the chance to communicate and exchange ideas with the guys behind it, in the early stages of the Framework's development process, most of the issues would be solved and I wouldn't have to face those issues. Well I guess I wasn't the only one that had that idea... Today, the EF group...

I don't know how deep you've gone with entity framework and if you've given any thought on advance enterprise issues, like caching for example, yet. Diving in it though and trying to use it in an enterprise wise project gave me the opportunity to start thinking on these kind of issues. So how can you cache using EF? I won't go into much detail about the type of Cache as this is not what this post is about so I'm just going to assume that Cache is some kind of memory based storage that I'm planning to use. You can...

If you had only had tine for just one Session in this year's TechEd then I would definitely recommend Mike Taulty's one on Linq to Entities (is going to be repeated on Friday). If you didn't make it this year then I would suggest watching its replay at The virtual side as soon as it comes available. It's not just the subject (which is interesting as it is), it's also the fact that he's a great speaker, one that speaks with a lot of examples and demos and avoids lengthy power point presentations. I was lucky to see...

I've been following ADO.NET Entity Framework for over a year now and the truth is I was bit surprised when DLinq was released. From the initial look at things - it seemed as though the ADO.NET EF folks and the LINQ to SQL folks were operating in completely isolated environments - each producing their own copy of a wheel but with very different attributes, benefits, and even target audiences. From what I've been reading lately though I came to understand that that isn't the case. The ADO.NET Entity Framework has a different scope than LINQ to SQL. The ADOEF is responsible...