I haven’t spent a lot of time on CodePlex until EF got there. So between learning my way around CodePlex and also how the EF team is organizing all of their information, I kept missing key information because I didn’t know where it was tucked away. So I thought I would list what I think are the most important bits in one spot.

1. The main page is at entityframework.codeplex.com.

2. The Roadmap gives a very broad overview of plans for EF.

Currently that lists:

1. Async support
2. Stored Proc and Function support for Code First and
3. Custom Code First Conventions

3. The Specifications provides a list of features that the team is working on and each one links to detailed specs for those items.

Currently the EF6 specs show a more comprehensive list. All but the tooling consolidation have made it into the alpha, though it’s *alpha* so nothing is set in stone yet.

• Task-based Asynchronous Pattern support in EF
• Tooling Consolidation
• Multi-tenant Migrations
• EF Dependency Resolution
• Code-based Configuration
• Migrations History Table Customization
• Custom Code First Conventions

The list currently doesn’t include the Stored Procs & Function support for Code First but those are definitely coming in EF6. This is confirmed in comments of the team’s blog post announcing the EF6 Alpha.

Each item on the list links to the specs for the item which provide some really good detail. You can also add comments here.

4. Design Meeting Notes

Got some free time to sate your curiosity? From what I see on the site these are posted every other week and are very extensive and well organized.

5. Discussions

This is one of the places where you can get very involved and influence the path that EF6 (and beyond) is taking. It is specifically for talking about the open source code base that’s on CodePlex . There are already a lot of very interesting discussions happening. For example, developers working with the team thinking through batch insert support.

There are 4 areas for discussions:

• EF Designer
• EF Power Tools
• EF Runtime
• General

6. Issues

This is where we can provide feedback on things that we’d like to see implemented or problems that need to get fixed. CodePlex provides a great way to filter issues. Go check out what’s there. Vote on things that are important to you. Provide additional feedback.

7. Code Code and more Code

One of the coolest parts about EF being open source is that you can download the source code. There are nightly builds you can play with. You can fork them if you want. But the absolutely best part is that if you’ve worked something out (perhaps you picked an issue to solve or are pursuing your own awesome idea) you can submit it to be included into the code base.

8. The changeset history on the source code area is fun to look through with details about each commit being made to the source.

This list should get you well on your way to keeping up with what’s going on and hopefully being inspired to contribute ideas, discussion and code to Entity Framework!

Being the lazy gal that I am, I tend to put this info on twitter which is just a passing note, to be forgotten within a day. So I thought I’d collect some of this recent content in one place.

Recent Interviews

• Nov 6th, Pluralsight “Meet the Author: Julie Lerman on Entity Framework in the Enterprise”

Pluralsight does these short interviewes whenever we publish a new course. So this one is for the 3+ hr course I published in September.

• Nov 1, DotNetRocks “Julie Lerman Digs Deep on EF5”

This was a fun interview recorded live when I visited the Dot Net Rocks Road Trip in Atlanta on Oct 22.

• Aug 7, DotNetRocks “Julie Lerman Explores Entity Framework 5”

This is a regular DotNetRocks interview recorded this summer.

Recent Articles

• September, DevProConnections Magazine: Improve Performance in Entity Framework (aka What’s New in EF5)

This article provides an overview of what’s new in EF5, from performance improvements to enum support and enhancements to the designer. I think the editors gave the article an unfortunate name.

• September MSDN Magazine Data Points: Moving Existing Projects to EF 5
• November MSDN Magazine Data Points: Entity Framework Designer Gets Some Love in Visual Studio 2012

Upcoming Articles

• December MSDN Magazine: “Data Points: Pain-Free Data Access in JavaScript—Yes, JavaScript”
• January 2013 MSDN Magazine: “Data Points: Shrink EF Models with DDD Bounded Contexts”

Recent Videos

• Pluralsight Course": Published September 18, Entity Framework in the Enterprise (3 hrs 15 minutes)

Covers implementing Domain Driven Design Bounded Contexts with EF, Repositories & Unit of Work and Automated Testing. The video requires a Pluralsight subscription.

• Pluralsight Blog: (Free) 10 minute snippet from the DDD Bounded Contexts module of the EF in the Enterprise Course.

Well..new as in published last month but I never blogged about it.

This is a 3hr16 minute course called “Entity Framework in the Enterprise”.

Learn how Entity Framework fits into your overall software solution when using enterprise level architecture. You’ll see how to implement DDD Bounded Contexts with EF, Repository and Unit of Work patterns and a variety of styles of automated testing. This course is applicable to apps built with V2010, EF4.1+ and .NET 4 as well as with VS2012, EF5 and .NET 4.5.

There are four modules.

1) Architecting the Data Layer (Overview)

2) Bounded DbContext

3) Repositories and Unit of Work

4) Automated Testing

Pluralsight put a 10-minute clip of this on YouTube and the blogged about it. The clip focuses on the Domain Driven Design Bounded Context pattern and how I’ll implement it with Entity Framework. Here is that clip.

The full course (which requires a subscription, but a month for $29 that gives you full access to the entire Pluralsight library is pretty cheap!) . Here’s the link to the course.

I now have 9 Entity Framework courses on Pluralsight which is almost 17 hours worth of content.

Enjoy!

There’s a known problem with EDMX code generation in VS2012. I’ve tested this a number of ways in VS2010 and can’t reproduce the problem there so it seems to be specific to VS2012.

The problem occurs when you have your model inside of a project folder such as in this screen shot:

When you make changes to your model, normally, saving the model will trigger the code generator to regenerate the classes.

But when the model is inside a folder, this won’t happen. (It’s not intentional…just a bug.) And you may not realize that this is the problem that’s causing you to have problems during development. Instead you won’t be able to use new (or modified) entities or properties when you are coding against the model because the generated classes weren’t updated.

So, for example, if you change an entity from Contact to Person, (and the EntitySet name will then change from Contacts to People), when you try to write a query against context.People, “People” will not exist as an option. Or if you try to write code related to Person, there will be no such class available.

This is a known issue and has been logged as an item for Entity Framework on the CodePlex site. You can vote for it to raise it’s priority level here: http://entityframework.codeplex.com/workitem/453.

In the meantime, if you want to keep your edmx file inside a project folder, you can still force the code generation to happen by selecting Run Custom Tool from the context menu of the Context.tt file and the model.tt file. Be sure to update BOTH files so that any entity name changes will get picked up by the context as well.

Thanks to Cori Drew who brought this problem to my attention and to Pawel Kadluczka from the EF team for pointing me to the work item when I had given up on a web search.

Many devs have been waiting for a toolkit so they can consume OData from [Metro] “Windows Store” apps they are building. The Release Candidate of these tools is now on the download center:

WCF Data Services Tools for Windows Store Apps RC:

“The WCF Data Services Tools for Windows Store Apps installer extends the Add Service Reference experience with client-side OData support for Windows Store Apps in Visual Studio 2012.”

 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30714

Mark Stafford from the OData team has written two blog posts that walk you through using the tooling and creating a WinRT (aka Windows Store) app

OData 101: Building our first OData-based Windows Store app (Part 1)

OData 101: Building our first OData-based Windows Store app (Part 2)

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and I make no promises that I will do this periodically, but here goes.

These are blog posts I’ve linked to twitter, but that’s ancient history after a few hours.

Code First Stored Procedures With Multiple Results  Posted on August 15, 2012. (Rowan Miller from the EF Team)

5 part series on Contributing to newly open-sourced EF by Arthur Vickers (another EF team member)

So you want to contribute to EF? Part 1: Introduction

So you want to contribute to EF? Part 2: The code

So you want to contribute to EF? Part 3: Testing

So you want to contribute to EF? Part 4: Developer experience

So you want to contribute to EF? Part 5: High-level architecture

A Troubleshooting Guide for Entity Framework Connections & Migrations

by K.Scott Allen. This one looks like a compilation of emails I have sent to people who ask me questions like this all the time. Kudos to Scott for putting this together.

Don’t forget that msdn.com/data/ef is the easy way to get to the Entity Framework Developer Center.

I’ve also written some posts on Entity Framework (they all go in my Data Access category). Since you are reading this post, I’ll assume you know how to find those so there’s no point in highlighting them here.