IdeaBlade has a 45 minute webcast demonstrating their Entity Framework implementation. They have taken EF and plugged it into their pre-existing framework which already knows how to do a lot of the things that the EF APIs can’t do yet. They also have extended the design tools (even with a pluralizer sniff sniff). They have extended the EDMX by adding additional attributes (which apparently won’t prevent the model from being used elsewhere) and replace the objectContext with their own object manager.
I’m really impressed. Because they already had their framework that they could plug EF into, they are light years ahead of me, who is starting from scratch trying to figure out how to make EF do these things on it’s own – which in some cases is not an easy task.
Some of the things that DEF can do that I am struggling with are
- Use objects across tiers
- Use objects across tiers without needing EF on the client
- Roll back changes to the object cache
- Query the object cache without hitting the database.
There’s more, but it’s too depressing to keep listing. I’m just kidding about it being depressing. I’m actually very happy to see someone prove that the EDM and the Entity Framework can be used (even if it takes some tweaking) in real enterprise applications.
I’m also a little envious. It would have been fun to work on this project with all of the resources and existing IP they had at their disposal.
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What’s even more impressive is they figured out how to serialize LINQ expressions.I don’t know how robust it is, but that’s how they get a request over the wire.This is not a simple task.The other issue you’ll struggle with is the price.Too much if you ask me – but I think their RTM version will be something to look at.
Before I ran accoss Devforce, I was looking at the idea of using CSLA.Net in combination with EF and a custom EF code generator. Devforce looks pretty nice, but pricey.