EF4: What is and is not supported

Alex James wrote a great response in the EF Forums to Graham Hay's question about feature support for specific desired functionality in EF4.

I thought Alex's response was worth surfacing so I am pasting it here into my blog.

Well I can give you some information, because all this has already been announced through various means including the EF Design Blog :
- POCO - yes
- Enum Support - unlikely
- EDM Designer Enhancements - yes, lots.
- Object Services API enhancements - yes, not sure what you are asking for exactly, but there have been numerous improvements to make life easier.
- L2E Math function mapping - not sure exactly what you mean but we have much better support for function in L2E now, you can even register your own 'stubs' for database functions and even 'model' functions.
- ForeignKey support - yes
- Custom Code Generation - yes (using T4)
- Table Value Functions - unlikely, but see Model Defined Functions below.

Others (off the top of my head, not an exhaustive list):
- Model Defined Functions (similar to a TVF because they are composable, big difference is that they are defined in the CSDL and as a result are in terms of the Conceptual Model not the Storage Model).
- Model First (i.e. create a model and build a database from the model)
- ComplexType support in the designer
- Better support for Stored Procedures


Hope this helps
Alex
Microsoft.

#1 Panzer on 5.18.2009 at 10:09 PM

Good site, admin.