Screencast – What’s new in the Entity Data Model Designer in VS2010

Friday, October 23 2009 - Data Access

I have created a screencast showing some of the best new features of the new Entity Data Model Designer. This is using the new Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2010.

The screencast is about 20 minutes long.

This is not designed to be an introduction to building models. Rather, it specifically highlights (and demonstrates) the improvements, so should be of great interest to those who have been using the designer or possibly looked at in the past and said “meh” and walked away.

In the video, I go over:

  • EDM Wizard naming the entities with proper plural and singular names and a few minor issues
  • Impact that Foreign Keys has on Association Mappings
  • Creating complex types
  • Mapping Insert/Update/Delete Stored procs to entities with Complex Types
  • Creating functions from Stored Procedures that return results which do not map to an entity
  • Quick look at Model First Design 

There are more new goodies in the designer, just couldn’t cover them all in one shot!

You can also find the screencast at http://www.screencast.com/users/JulieLerman/folders/EF4

Thanks to TechSmith’s Screencast.com for hosting my video!

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#1 Mike on 10.24.2009 at 12:05 AM

Great screencast. I love the new features. The generation of the differencing sql script would be a great addition.

One question though, is it possible to implement something similar to a UNIQUE constraint in EF?

#2 Frans Bouma on 10.24.2009 at 5:00 AM

nice video. Two things:

1) by having the solution explorer etc. at the right, you're not doing yourself a favor, as western languages read from left to right, so by adding them to the right, your code is moved all the way to the left, and as code starts at the left of the code window, your eyes are moved more far to the left than when you would when you have the solution explorer etc. at the left. (as you can then almost look straight ahead to the start of the code window :)

2) The complex type created from the proc: isn't it confusing that it is placed right with the complex type used in the entities? I mean: it suggests that you can re-use the order... complex type in an entity (which likely is possible), however within an entity it's not a stand alone type, its instance is always inside an entity, while with a proc it's always created by the proc call. Also, as it is tied to the proc, re-using it in entities is really brittle, as the complex type can't be changed if it's both in an entity and the result type of a proc, as you then have to change the proc as well (which is likely not expected)

#3 Tarique on 10.25.2009 at 6:31 PM

Nice Webcast Julie. Looking forward to seeing more webcasts and blogs on EFv4 from you.

#4 Richard Pawson on 10.26.2009 at 12:33 PM

Julie

Very useful as always. One thing you haven't covered is a really bit thing for us: the fact that you can now make associations uni-directional from within the EF designers instead of having to edit the XML. Took me a while to discover how to do this, though it's obvious once you know: just delete the navigation property within the Entity at the end where you don't want navigability.

Richard

P.S. I'm still hoping you're going to take a look at what we've done with EF4 and Naked Entities soon ;-) (See http://www.nakedobjects.net )

#5 Jason Short on 10.29.2009 at 9:00 PM

Wow, you get really UGLY SQL script. When is Microsoft going to start actually having script generation that matches their best practices? Stop with the ANSI_NULLS, and SCHEMA macro usage and actually write decent SQL! Actually put ; on the end of lines (Microsoft samples are all being redone to use these best practices, why isn't production script generation?).

And I have not seen anything about a third party way to plugin to that system yet. :(

#6 Blasar on 12.11.2009 at 11:20 PM

This video makes me interested in installing visual studio 2010 and learn with more depth framework entities. I have a question when to use linq and when framework entities?

#7 A-K on 3.03.2010 at 9:52 AM

Greate webcast. I'm waiting impatiently for VS2010 to release