I wanted to see some of the new Beta2 (in the June CTP bits) functionality of Entity Framework so I've been poking around. You can see a nice list of what to look for on Danny Simmons' blog . One thing that was a huge source of frustration was the inability to support database constraints where a column...

By default, when querying entities, you need to explicitly use the Load method to get related data. This is often called "lazy loading" and ensure you only get what you ask for rather than having a query return ALL related data automatically. The new SPAN method forces an entity to include specifid children...

Danny Simmons has a great list of changes to Entity Framework that have finally arrived in the latest CTP. These improvements are not insignificant and the list is filled with functionality that many of us have been really looking forward to. I' feel a little harnessed having to use VWD Express right...

Note that the installation instructions for the June CTP of VWD (which the June CTP of Entity Framework installs on top of) have changed. See the ADO.NET Team blog for the updated version of the post....

The ADONET Team today announced that the June CTP of Entity Framework is available . It is currently only available packaged with the June CTP of Visual Web Developer Express. Being a CTP release, they have just done enough to get something in our hands so we can see what they are working on. A lot of...

While at TechEd, David Sceppa wrote about the status of various database vendors as they create proviers for LINQ and Entity Framework. read more [A new DevLife post]...

The ADO.NET team is conducting a focus group about Linq to Entities during TEchEd. Unfortunately, they posted this today and the deadline to sign up is today. Here's the info to sign up. I won't be at TEchEd this year and neither will Roger Jennings, but Roger has already created a great list of points...

In my short span betwee MIX and DevTeach (leaving tonight), I've been heads down playing with Silverlight's Inking capabilities and preparing for my DevTeach sessions and avoiding dealing with the delay of EF. In the meantime, Roger Jennings continues to organize all of the info about ADO.NET Entity...

In Pablo Castro's session today, I noticed a link on the resource page to his own blog. I have never known that Pablo (tech lead on the ADO.NET team) had a blog and couldn't believe that I could have missed such a thing. Luckily there is wireless available at the conference so I immediately browsed to...

I was wondering what "data services in the cloud" ... Pablo Castro's Mix Session, was going to be about. Project Astoria exposes data that is exposed through the Entity Framework. So you build your EDM and then the service sits on top of htat. It is two way... you can use HTTP PUT, POST and DELETE. Here...

Mike Pizzo writes a post about Microsoft's data access strategy that covers a few important things: 1) Announces that EF will not make it into the Orcas release but will ship "A few months after the shipment of Orcas, and within the first half of 2008". This plan will allow them to give us more than...

Mike Taulty has been doing short screen casts about LINQ to SQL. I love his approach as I know from experience how difficult it is to try to give a decent presentation of LINQ to SQL in a single 90 minute session when you have to start from scratch. There are 9 so far and more coming. Here is a link...

From the ADO.NET Team blog : Late last week, after bits had been finalized, we found a bug in the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Wizard that shipped with Visual Studio “Orcas” beta 1. The problem has now been corrected. Please download and install the patch available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads...

Although I haven't gotten my Beta1 bits quite yet , I'm keeping an eye on the ADO.NET Orcas forums and saw that apparently something broke in the Wizard that creates an the schema files from a db. Lance Olson from the ADO.NET team posted that they are aware of the boo-boo and there will be a fix/workaround...

Check out this post from Mike Dodaro , which begins with: What else do you need to know about the Entity Framework? We've documented basic syntax and provided a few samples. How can we improve the documentation? Send us scenarios you want to implement....

I found some interesting ADO.NET labs and sessions on the MIX site today! SESSIONS Accessing Data Services in the Cloud Speaker(s): Pablo Castro - Microsoft Audience(s): Designer, Developer Come learn about new Microsoft technologies that enable you to make your data available over the Web through a...

Yay yay yay. I am not sure when this happened, but I just discovered that Pablo Castro will be doing the keynote at DevTeach (Montreal, May 14-18) and not surprisingly, he'll be talking about the Entity Framework. More here....

There are a lot of us who have been looking forward to this show being posted: Daniel Simmons on ADO.NET Entity Framework . Now I have to find some time this weekend to listen to it. Roger Jennings has a fantastic analysis of the show here . While at DevConnections, Richard and Carl were talking about...

It's not often that one sees their name right next to Anders ' (especially considering that I'm a VB programmer :-)), but check out this LINQ article in the current issue of Redmond Developer News . While the focus is Anders and this great technology he and others (and always with a nod to Alan Griver...

A recent LINQ forum question asked about the differences between Linq to SQL and the Entity Framework. This is the response that I wrote and thought I would surface it in my blog: Besides that Linq to SQL is only for SQL ( ) one of the big differences is that the EDM is more flexible and more loosely...

Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati has a book on LINQ that he wrote against very early bits. When the March 2007 CTP came out, he blogged a list of things that he discovered had changed in LINQ syntax that required updates to his book. The list is handy if you have code even from the January CTP....

I am at DevConnections where I was VERY excited to see Brian Dawson (ADO.NET team) do not one but TWO Entity Framework talks on Monday. Brian has a newer build than what we are working with in the March CTP and I saw some stuff that made me wanna whine "gimme gimme". SPAN - calling span on an entity...

Last week, I inaugurated my ADO.NET Orcas Overview at the TEchValley.NET User Group in Albany NY (with thanks to INETA!!). It was a serendipitous night for me to present there as they had just moved to new digs for their meeting, a very convenient, spacious and high tech location, so they packed the...

From the forums ( this thread ): A future version of SqlMetal.exe will generate DataContract and DataMember attributes on your entities for you. Putting them on the DataContext won't work because the DataContext is not serializable. (Matt Warren, Microsoft)...

There are some great questions bubbling up in the forums. THe ADO.NET team is busy in these discussions as well as writing some good blog posts on Entity Framework. Here's the current run down... [A DevLife post]...

GeekSpeak is a lot more free-form than a typical webcast and I'm not sure what to expect. I'll have the new CTP of ORCAS open and I guess we'll poke around Entity Framework and the three LINQ to ADO.NET techs (LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities nad LINQ to DataSet). And the most fun part is that I'll be doing...

I've noticed that the posts on the ADO.NET and LINQ forums for Orcas have completely subsided after a flurry over the weekend. I guess everyone had to get back to work!...

There are SO many ways to "skin the data access cat" in Orcas that I'm getting a little cross-eyed. (Though this could be from looking at all of the XML in the Entity Data Models.) I thought I would try to sort it out a little here since I have done this for some of the presentations I am putting together...

In a previous interation, I managed to track down some sample code that built a LINQ call to a stored procedure, the class which it returns and executed it in LINQ to SQL. The code has changed dramatically in the March CTP. Luckily, Mike Taulty beat me to it and I leveraged the C# code in his post to...

VB9 has come a long way in the new March CTP of Orcas! Paul Vick has a quick list of what is now in there. And there are a lot of good details in the msdn documentaiton that comes along with the CTP. A few things I noticed quickly when bringing my LINQ for SQL demos over to the new bits. First, and happily...

The ADO NET Team has been cranking out fab content on their blog. Brian Dawson just wrote a post all about Object Services. In trying to sort out all of the options that we now have with Entity Framework and LINQ, I'm always happy to see a list like this. But go read the whole post so nothing is out...

I saw mention of this new version of the command line tool in this forum post so I went looking in the MarchCTP. I modified some of the desciriptions a little to fit them onto a powerpoint slide, so this is a tad different than the real tihng C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5.20209>edmgen /help...

Since a few people have asked me in email (which is not a problem...), I thought I'd make mention that the next CTP for Orcas is the February CTP. It is coming out either late February or early March. This version, though still a CTP, should have all of the LINQ and EF stuff updated and incorporated...

Don't get me wrong. I love LINQ and LINQ for SQL. But the more I have been digging into it the more things I discover that, as a developer, I may want to explicitly choose how to use. That's probably why my talk on Linq for SQL with Web Apps last night at VTdotNET was pretty long. (Going to have to cut...

After living 100% in LINQ for the past week, this is my conclusion. And that's just LINQ to SQL. There are just so many ways to skin the database with LINQ. The possibilities seem quite endless at this point. But I'm having fun and we'll see if I can keep it to 1.5 - 2 hours tonight at VTdotNET! Swoon...

ADO.NET Orcas brings forth a LOT of new concepts, especially for anyone unfamiliar with Object Relational Mapping. One of the points of confusion is how entities are wired to the database. Now that I understand it, I thought I would use my own way of explaining it to help anyone who might have a hard...

If you have read the phrase "ADO.NET Orcas" then you have probably seen the phrase "impedance mismatch" trailing right behind it. Do you even know what it means? I don't even think the phrase makes sense! Read more... [A DevLife post]...

What's in the Jan CTP for people looking for ADO.NET Orcas goo? It's basically the same as the October bits except the documentation is there. I actually sat here going back and forth between three VPCs this morning, comparing the August, October and January CTPs, just to be sure. Here's what I found...