I’m excited about embarking on my first full-week workshop. Until now, I have done a number of one-day workshops but I have always felt that I needed more time. There’s so much to share! Maybe five days will be enough? The workshop will be in Boston (Waltham, to be exact) the first week of...

After I finished writing the first edition of Programming Entity Framework, 832 pages long, I announced to anyone within earshot that if I every talked about writing another book to just shoot me. After I finished writing the second edition of Programming Entity Framework , which came in at nearly 900...

I was using a hack to turn off the Database Initialization for code first. I didn’t want code first to do the model/database comparison, and found the best way I could figure out…I deleted the EDMMetadata table in the database. Yes, a total hack. Sergey Barskiy and Rowan Miller straightened...

One of the announcements this morning at MIX11 was the MVC 3 Tools Update. Phil Haack has a blog post about them here: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/04/12/introducing-asp-net-mvc-3-tools-update.aspx I’m really happy to see that the newest MVC 3 Tools for Visual Studio embrace Entity Framework...

Just got this very nice note from Alex Keh at Oracle. Hi Julie, Since I know you have a special interest in Entity Framework, I wanted to let you know that Oracle released its EF beta today. It can be downloaded from OTN. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/dotnet/whatsnew/index.html Regards, Alex...

This is what I’ve realized about using the latest iteration of EF4’s Code First in the EF Feature Pack CTP. (I will keep clarifying that code first and the new EF bits in the CTP are a preview, not for production and subject to change …) When using code first where you simply create...

There have been a lot of improvements to code first since CTP3 and in fact, the team has been experimenting with changes to the core Entity Framework APIs that not only support even simpler programming with code first but that we’ll benefit from in an upcoming release of .NET. (No, I don’t...

By now you know I’m prone to exaggeration so that “billions” thing is a stretch, but you get the point hopefully. Lots of legacy databases have hundreds or even more tables in them. People building Entity Data Models by reverse engineering a database often bring every table and view...

We are closing in on finalizing the 2nd edition of Programming Entity Framework! Although the rough draft chapters are already available through Safari’s Rough Cuts program (here: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807252 ) I have been editing and reshaping the content since those chapters were...

The date (Thursday, June 24th), the city (Stockholm) and the abstract are firm. REGISTER HERE: http://www.dotnet4ever.se/ or directly at http://www.informator.se/utbildningar/seminarier/seminarier/hard-core-entity-framework-40.aspx Now I have to wait for the person organizing this workshop on my behalf...

Programming Entity Framework 2nd Edition (based on the RTM of VS2010/.NET 4.0) is currently available on Safari Rough Cuts at http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807252 . At this point most of the chapters are there. You’ll find 2-23. Note that chapter 4 will be broken into 4 and 5 in the final edition...

I’ve been using a lot of NoTracking queries to grab lists of data that I don’t need change tracked. It enhances performance and cuts down on resources. There are some nuances about these entities, however. One of the interesting behaviors of EF4’s Lazy Loading is that even if you have...

When I have done “what’s new in EF4” talks at user groups and conferences, I like to show off the new pluralization support in the EDM Wizard. I also like to have a little fun showing some cases where it doesn’t do so well. For example, it correctly singularized Breweries to Brewery...

Ayende has reminded us that Entity Framework Profiler’s Beta period ends tomorrow when it goes RTM. But that means the 30% discount also ends. It will go from $220US to $315US tomorrow. I spend a lot of time looking at what’s going on in my database when using EF and the views that EFProf...

WCF RIA Services contains a special domain service for entity framework which will automatically be used if you use the Domain Service template in Visual Studio. This winter I tried the template with a few projects. One of them had EntityObjects and the other had POCO entities. The EntityObjects worked...

The MIX build of RIA services has a bug that has been fixed since. But you might experience it as I did this morning and go around in circles for a while. This blog post is to help you avoid wasting that time. I normally create my model is in its own project and hadn’t seen this problem until this...

Eager loading with Entity Framework depends on the special ObjectQuery.Include method. We’ve had that from Day 1 (first version of ef). Now we use ObjectSets in EF4 which inherit from ObjectQuery (thereby inheriting Include) and also implement IObjectSet. IObjectSet allows us to break the queries...

UPON REFLECTION, I DECIDED THAT THIS POST WAS PRETTY MISGUIDED (must have been one of those days...). So, for safety , I have removed it completely. You *can* use T4 to customize the code generated for EntityObjects but if you begin with the T4 EntityObject template and replace .NET 4.0 specific logic...

These are the first two. I’ve got more coming! If you don't have a Pluralsight subscription, grab a free guest pass and you'll have have access since these are part of the subset of guest pass content along with a ton of other great videos. These will also be on MSDN online shortly....

Hooray! Turns out it was a bug ("unintended breaking change) and it's getting fixed for RTM! :) [ see Connect submission and Microsoft's response ] Great catch George! This is an edge case that I had not noticed, but was brought to my attention this morning in an email from Dave Russell who pointed...

Thanks to Danny Simmons ' comment below clarifying that the provides that support EF3.5 will still work for EF4 " just without new provider affecting features like model first." As far as I can tell, and confirmed by Fabio Pandolfo (@fabiopand on twitter) who is also on the hunt, DevArt's Oracle...

When Entity Framework finally brought in support for Lazy Loading, there were still complaints. The lazy loading in EF4 is context based, not property based as defined by some of the other ORMs. (I’m not sure which ones or how many.) I was thinking about this today and realized that EF does, in...

In the first version of Entity Framework, if you wanted to create a PK/FK association between entities where there was no such constraint defined in the database you have to manually edit the SSDL (and lose that edit if you update the model from db). Why would you want to do this? The typical use case...

I had an email this morning from someone who was having trouble with reports populated using Entity Framework. He was running a report repeatedly but changing the filter. For example, Customers whose last name is Smith , then Customers whose last name is Barber . The problem was that after running the...

After thinking about the issue with EF4 still not supporting spatial data, I emailed spatial data wizard, Jason Follas , and asked him his thoughts. He’s not too familiar with EF but said if EF supported blob types then you could just use the Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlGeometry type to read in the...

Because I’ve had a lot of conversations about spatial data types lately, I thought I would create a SQL Server table that contained one of every type then bring it into an entity data model using the wizard to see what happens. This is in EF4. Here are screenshots of the table and the entity showing...

If you have a graph of entities which are being managed by an ObjectContext, e.g, a LineItem and its Product, and for one reason or another, you detach the Product from the context, lazy loading will query for that Product again if you happen to call LineItem.Product. Now you will have two instances...

Adding a note to highlight Damien's comment below. Damien is on the EF team and does not recommend using the current Feature CTP with the RC. A new version will be available "soon". In comments of another blog post Ivan reminds me of something else I ran into the the VS2010 RC. I tweeted on...

Update: After realizing that we still want access to it, the team has made the Beta 2 file available again. You can get it from their original blog post , not from the Visual Studio Gallery links but look for a zip file at the bottom of the post. But there's more! While I had managed to figure out one...

The video from my webcast, Top 10 Treats in Entity Framework 4 is available on Oreilly’s website: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1517 . I just discovered that WebEx saved the chat window from my O’Reilly webcast last month. So I thought I would pick out the quesitons and answer them here...

Tomorrow at 10am PST/1pm EST, I’ll be presenting a live web cast for O’Reilly Media called the Top 10 Treats in Entity Framework 4. The web cast is one hour (including intro and questions). Short & sweet. You can register at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1517 . The webcast will be recorded...

One of the benefits of Visual Studio’s multi-targeting is that if you are still stuck using the .NET 3.5 version of Entity Framework and are unable to move to EF4 (so sad), you can still get the new designer goodies for a .NET 3.5 project. Remember that the designer is a VS2010 feature, not a ...

Just a friendly reminder that I’m passing on from one of the tech reviewers of my book who (thankfully) noticed that I had left a note in there about Single & SingleOrDefault not being supported. They were not in .NET 3.5 SP1 Entity Framework, but they are now supported in EF4. Single is the...

Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 1- Model and POCO Classes Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 2- The Repository Agile EF4 Repository: Part 3 -Fine Tuning the Repository Agile EF4 Repository: Part 4: Compiled LINQ Queries Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository Part 5: IObjectSet and Include...

One of the things I struggled with in n-Tier apps in EFv1 was the options for reconstructing entity state on the server side in order to call SaveChanges when modified data was passed in from the client. The options were to hit the database to get a set of current server values and then apply updates...

Not sure if I’ve blogged all of these (so twitter-addicted these days) so here’s a list of recent articles & webcasts I’ve done on EF4. CoDe Magazine What’s New in Entity Framework 4? Part 1: API Changes (Sept/Oct 2009) What’s New in Entity Framework 4, Part 2: Modeling...

Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 1- Model and POCO Classes Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 2- The Repository Agile EF4 Repository: Part 3 -Fine Tuning the Repository Agile EF 4 Repositories Part 4: Compiled LINQ Queries Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository Part 5: IObjectSet and Include...

Even when working with POCOs, the EF’s ObjectContext can track the objects using ObjectStateEntry objects just as it does for entities that inherit from EntityObject. I was thinking about ObjectContext.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntry. This method has two overloads. One takes an entity and...

I have gathered up my slides and demos from Oredev and DevConnections and put them on the internet. The PPTs are on Slideshare. The demos are on the downloads page of my book’s website: www.learnentityframework.com . That page also has the links to the slideshare urls. Here’s what you’ll...

Third post in my Agile EF4 Repository blog series: Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 1- Model and POCO Classes Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 2- The Repository Agile EF4 Repository: Part 3 -Fine Tuning the Repository Agile EF 4 Repositories Part 4: Compiled LINQ Queries Agile Entity...

(11/21/09: Note I have changed my interface name to IBAGAContext, because it is really a contract for the context, not the repository). The Series: so far Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 1- Model and POCO Classes Agile Entity Framework 4 Repository: Part 2- The Repository Agile EF4 Repository...

I’m going to lay out this out in a few blog posts because it’s complex. As I am not a TDD developer, I won’t be starting from the tests. I’m doing this in a fashion which is logical to me. But that will mean you’ll get some teasers along the way that will be fleshed out...

Not at PDC? Well, yeah PDC is having some sessions streamed, like keynotes etc, but for the rest of us, there’s www.notatpdc.com . Two days of live presentations on lots of great topics. Here’s a screenshot of the schedule so far (note that it is CENTRAL time). Go to the website to get speaker...

I knew that Intellitrace existed, but not until I saw Nikhil Kotahari’s tweet from PDC09 “ Cool VS demo - intellitrace - see your db queries, and track it back to your LINQ code #pdc09 ” did I think to look at what IntelliTrace reports with respect to Entity Framework database interaction...

In my EF Tips & Tricks talk that I just did at DevConnections, I have a suggestion to reduce redundant methods where you might expose queries to generate reference lists. E.g. static List<CustomerType> CustomerTypeList(MyEntities context) { return context.CustomerTypes.OrderBy(ct => ct.Type...

Last year at the fall 2008 DevConnections conference, I was very happy to hear Scott Guthrie providing a clear message about web forms vs. MVC in ASP.NET 4.0. Now, I am seeing something that is new for MSDN Documentation, not only similar clarity but actual guidance on when Microsoft suggests to use...

The EF team just released the newest version of the Feature CTP that is now compatible with VS2010 Beta2. Hooray for compatibility, but more importantly, we can now work with a greatly enhanced version of the Code Only feature and Self-Tracking Entities. Code-Only is the API that allows you to use EF...

In EF v1, it is possible to have one way navigations where you have an association between two entities but a navigation in only one of them. But the designer didn’t support this. If you deleted a navigation, the association was automatically removed. You could, however, go into the XML and remove...

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...

There are two changes to the lazy loading feature introduced in the Beta 1 version of Entity Framework. The first is that the property, ObjectContext.ContextOptions.DeferredLoadingEnabled has been changed to ObjectContext.ContextOptions.LazyLoadingEnabled . This is a breaking change from Beta 1 and you’ll...

In EF version 1, a reference entity and it’s related EntityReference.EntityKey stay in sync when you change one or the other. E.g., if you have a sales order, it’s Customer property and the CustomerReference.EntityKey are automatically kept in sync by the ObjectContext. (Thanks to Craig for...

Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4 released today on MSDN for subscribers so we can now start playing. It is too soon for screenshots but here are some awesome things to look for in Beta 2 after poking around for a bit. 1) Foreign Keys are now the default for new models. You’ll see the foreign key checkbox...

Last summer, I asked this question in a thread in the MSDN forums : So is there anyway to completely override savechanges - just replace it with your own code if for some reason you wanted to? The answer was no. As I am digging deeper and deeper into EF4 while I write the 2nd edition of Programming Entity...

Update: The webcast is online! But I unfortunately, the sound is dreadful. I’m still waiting for the recording of the webcast to go online. It’s not there yet, but when it is, it will be on the same OReillyNet page that was used for registering: Entity Framework Tips & Tricks August 27th...

Tomorrow (Thursday Aug 27th at 1pm EST) I will be presenting a one hour webcast on Entity Framework Tips and Tricks . If you are curious what to expect, here’s the rundown. It’s a Tips & Tricks session, filled with a variety of things that people ask about on the forums and other things...

Last week the Interop guys at Microsoft released yet another piece of their PHP interop goodness, a toolkit for PHP developers hitting ADO.NET Data Services . It just happened that I had *just* set up a service for a client who was consuming it with a PHP application. I pointed him to the new toolkit...

I’ll be doing a webcast on Entity Framework Tips & Tricks this Thursday for O’Reilly Media. It will be at 1pm EST and last for an hour. I plan to set aside some of that time for Q&A. It’s always fun to share these tips and I hope you can join me. More details and register here...

I have a very difficult task ahead of me with the EF4 version of my book. The book is already over 800 pages and will only get longer with all of the new features in Entity Framework 4. However O’Reilly has tasked me to keep the book to 800 pages. Something has to give. I am very proud of the fact...

On Tuesday I blogged that the Oslo + Data Programmability (EF, ADO.NET, etc.) Teams Merge d. Well, I guess it was public and I could have talked about it a long time ago after all. Elisa Flasko from the DP team pointed out this SD Times article from April 1. Microsoft combines SOA and storage business...

From Jonathan Bruce at DataDirect : I am happy to announce that we’ve released our GA for Connect for ADO.NET 3.3 ! This includes our support for the ADO.NET Entity Framework for Oracle and a host of enterprise-ready features that will greatly enhance your makes EF deployment on your Oracle systems...

After running a variety of performance tests, Gergely Orosz comes to the following conclusion: The performance measurements only provided significant differences in two cases. When it comes to storing data , Entity Framework proved to be significantly faster than NHibernate When deleting data , NHibernate...

There’s an Entity Framework mapping that I have paid very little attention to because I didn’t realize it was possible. It was possible, just not obvious or easy in VS2008 SP1. Thanks to Adam Cogan , who asked a question about this feature, I’ve discovered that it gets a lot more usable...

Well, it’s official. I’ve gone completely mad and just sent a signed contract back to O’Reilly for the rewrite of my book, Programming Entity Framework. With such big changes to Entity Framework, I could not let the current version of the book fade away, even though so much of it will...

If you are working with the Beta 1 of VS2010 in an Entity Data Model, you might notice some new properties in the Properties Window for an entity’s scalar property. Are they new properties? Actually only one of them is. Let’s first change the view to see how these properties are grouped....

Kati Iceva, the gal I know as the brains behind query compilation for Entity Framework (though she may have some partners in crime) has written a great blog post laying out some of the improvements to query generation in EF4. Improvements to the Generated SQL in .NET 4.0 Beta1 Kati explains 7 major changes...

When you are building or updating a model from a database, included Stored Procedures find their way into the SSDL (Store Schema Description Layer) of the metadata but not into the conceptual model. In order to expose them in your model, you need to create something called a Function Import which imports...

I made a big effort not to allow my What’s New in VS2010 presentation at Vermont.NET to turn into a What’s New in EF4 session. However, while I was demoing the Extension Manager, I used the T4 Editor extension as an example and what better way to show off T4 then to show the new code generation...

I certainly have not yet explored the depths of EF4 to the same extent as I have with the current version and I have a lot of discoveries ahead of me. Thanks to a tweet this morning by Zekq , I finally saw one of the promised improvements to EF’s stored procedure support. In EF v1, you can easily...

This morning I shared my frustration with writing data access and object materialization code for an older non-Entity Framework app. It didn’t take long for a number of developers to reply that they were feeling the same way! Read the full post on my DevLife blog: Life without EF or any ORM...

Now that DataDirect’s Beta of their Oracle Provider with EF support is available, Jonathan Bruce (from DD) is starting to write technical posts about how to use it. Yesterday he posted Effective EF with Oracle And today: Effective EF with Oracle (Stored Procedures with REF CURSORs)...

Most often when you want to interact with an object’s state, or change tracking information you cannot do that through the object itself. Instead you need to get at the ObjectStateEntry which the context created to manage the object. Inside the the ObjectStateEntry you have access to the current...

There were three big things that the EF team could not get into the VS2010 box on time – POCO T4 Templates, Code-Only features (POCO without a model) and Self-Tracking Entities. Even though VS2010 is only in Beta 1, the way the release cycles work, these three things won’t be part of the...

Model Defined Functions are a great addition to EF4. It allows you to add functions directly into your model rather than having to place the additional logic into business classes. This not only allows the functions to be “just there”, but you can use them in queries, something that you cannot...

Alex James, a program manager on the EF team, has been posting a series of EF tips that just keeps getting better and better. Most of the tips revolve around using EF today with some nods to the upcoming EF4 in Visual Studio 2010. Read more…. [A DevLife blog post]...

DevTeach is this week and as always, is much anticipated by attendees and speakers alike. I have been to every DevTeach since its inception in 2004 and truly enjoy it thanks to its intimacy. It’s not a gigantic conference so its really easy for everyone to get lots of quality time together. I’ll be teaching...

Tonight I’ll be doing a presentation to the Ft. Lauderdale user group via Live Meeting . I’ve been playing with a WPF app that uses EF and Twitter together for something a little different than the norm to demo. And I’m doing it in VS2010. Why not? I’ll also be doing a first for me which is  using...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" A Look at Lazy Loading in EF4 May 22 Upgrading EF projects to EF4- Don't forget to target .NET 4.0 May 22 Customizing EDM Code Gen in EF4 May 21 Complex Types in the EDM Designer in EF4 and a look at updating complex types in code May 21 The much improved...

I had an interesting question by email today and I thought I would share the response. If you have done any EDM testing with the Northwind database, you may be familiar with the self-referencing relationship in the Employee entity. Employees are related to other employees who are their managers. This...

The Swiss MSDN team released an awesome Hands on Lab (thanks Danny for the pointer). One of the features of the lab was an n-tier solution. I had to see how they did it. They are using a shallow graph - i.e. no graph at all, so only have to deal with single entities. Then what they are doing is passing...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" Upgrading EF projects to EF4- Don't forget to target .NET 4.0 May 22 Customizing EDM Code Gen in EF4 May 21 Complex Types in the EDM Designer in EF4 and a look at updating complex types in code May 21 The much improved EDM Wizard Pluralization in VS2010 May...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" Customizing EDM Code Gen in EF4 May 21 Complex Types in the EDM Designer in EF4 and a look at updating complex types in code May 21 The much improved EDM Wizard Pluralization in VS2010 May 21 Checking for EF to TSQL Query Compilation Changes in VS2010 Beta1...

Congrats to Jiri Cincura and the developers who have just released the Firebird provider which includes EF support! You can read about the release (and a happy company which is using it) on Jiri's blog at http://blog.vyvojar.cz/jirka/archive/2009/05/22/ann-firebirdclient-2-5-final-released.aspx . You...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" Complex Types in the EDM Designer in EF4 and a look at updating complex types in code May 21 The much improved EDM Wizard Pluralization in VS2010 May 21 Checking for EF to TSQL Query Compilation Changes in VS2010 Beta1 May 19 EF4- What is and is not supported...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" The much improved EDM Wizard Pluralization in VS2010 May 21 Checking for EF to TSQL Query Compilation Changes in VS2010 Beta1 May 19 EF4- What is and is not supported May 13 One of the great features of an EF Entity Data Model is the complex type. However, the designer...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" Checking for EF to TSQL Query Compilation Changes in VS2010 Beta1 May 19 EF4- What is and is not supported May 13 As promised, there have been a LOT of improvements to the EDM Designer in VS2010. THe first one I looked for was to see how the pluralization worked (using...

Previous "What's New in EF 4 Posts" EF4- What is and is not supported May 13 I know that the very brainy Kati Iceava is working on improving the query compilation that SqlClient does when creating TSQL from EF queries, so I checked a few queries to see if the changes had reached the Beta yet. I looked...

As a follow up to a post I wrote earlier today on unit testing in the current version of Entity Framework [ Unit Testing in EF v1 - the database conundrum ], I wanted to point to a new post that appeared this afternoon on the ADONET team blog by Diego Vega on testing in EF4 (the new version that will...

Seeing a Unit Testing in EF post on Eric Raeber's Too Much Code blog, made me remember I wrote this post (after talking to Eric about this topic) on an airplane over a week ago and never posted it. For an architect's guidance, check out Eric's blog post as well. One of the challenges with Unit Testing...

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...

"this just in ..." New! Beta release of DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET Entity Framework provider for Oracle A few highlights from that page: Full support for LINQ to Entities, EntitySQL, and ADO.NET Data Services Support for Oracle 8i through 11g with a single provider...

Nothing to see here, really. I'm just practicing calling "the next version of Entity Framework that will be in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0" an easier way: "EF4". We've been referring to it as V2 for such a long time. But since it is part of the .NET/VS release cycle, it makes more sense to append...

I've been asked this question enough times that I thought I would blog it. While it may seem obvious to some, it is not to everyone who is just starting out with Entity Framework or LINQ to SQL or ADO.NET Data Services. When you write a query against an Entity Data Model or a LINQ to SQL model that query...

A few months ago, Diane Wilson reported her performance findings when comparing EF to LINQ to SQL to DataReaders. Something looked wrong to me because her numbers were vastly different than what I had been seeing in the many perf tests that I did. We talked a bit and I pointed her to the critical perf...

Everything in life is about choices and usually we have to evaluate our options before we make those choices. So it goes with eager loading vs. deferred loading in Entity Framework. We have the option of eager loading with the Include method and can use it very creatively. For an entity that has a lot...

Many to Many relationships are defined in a database using a join table. Depending on the schema of that join table, they are represented differently in an Entity Framework EDM. The Person...PersonStores...StoreLocations becomes a clean *:* relationship between Person and Store. Person has an EntityCollection...

I have used EF with SQL Server 2008 & 2005, Pro, Standard and Express. I have not every bothered playing with CE, because for the most part the experience should be the same. But there are a few places where you might run into trouble. One is related to connecting to the database and has nothing...

I'm not saying great because it shows where EF shines in performance, but because the tests look interesting and thorough. Alex Konduforov goes past the typical "let's test performance" queries that just do select * from customers and looks at query performance from a lot of angles. In a powerpoint deck...

At the MVP summit, we saw a presentation on the introduction of FKs into the EF metadata and framework. While they go a long way to solve the many problems of using Entities across tiers, you will now have an either/or choice to make with your model. When building a model, you will now choose between...

People email me this question every once in a while so I thought I'd blog it. It's possible to get the EDMX file into a state that confuses the designer. I know that I've done it by making changes in the designer and then closing the file without saving those changes. After that, I can't open the file...

I flatter myself by suggesting that this comes from "the great minds think alike department", as Danny Simmons has written a blog showing how to do something that I am quite fond of - searching the ObjectContext for entities that are already in memory. If you don't know EF very well, you might assume...

One of the big questions people have about Entity Framework's dynamically generated queries is "what does the store query look like?", immediately followed by "is that store query acceptable"? There are a few ways to see what the store generated queries look like. One is to use ObjectQuery...

Although I have been trying to maintain a list of available providers on my book's website ( www.learnentityframework.com/resources ), there's now a dedicated page on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dd363565.aspx . (I can't seem to find the navigation path from the home page of the data...

Last week, I was demoing some basic Entity Framework queries to a client and explaining that the store queries are parameterized, alleviating one area of concern. But when we looked at SQL Profiler the query was not parameterized. Why was this? The query I had used was: var query = from c in context...

Last week I flew to Philadelphia to speak at the Philly.NET user group. I did not one, but two EF talks to an astonishingly packed room that I have been told contained 120 people! Thanks to INETA for sponsoring this meeting and my travel expenses. There were even 3 new INETA speakers in attendance: Rachel...

Here is an error you might get if you are refactoring a project that contains an Entity Data Model. For search purposes: BAModel.csdl(3,4) : error 0019: The EntityContainer name must be unique. An EntityContainer with the name 'BAEntities' is already defined. BAModel.csdl(118,4) : error 0019: Each type...

Did you know that the default classes generated by the Entity Framework Designer don't have class constructors? And that this is great news? It means that you can create your own class constructors that will always be used when new entity objects are instantiated. This isn't limited to those times when...

I haven't had a chance to play with this yet but from his blog post alone, I'm happy to see the secret project that has kept Mathieu busy for the last month and a half. He's building an EDM Designer in WPF and though it is currently only read-only (aka a "viewer") it has two nice features already. The...

Jiri Cincura announces Beta1 of the FIredbird ADO.NET Data Provider 2.5.0 which has support for Entity Framework. The release is imminent. Read the announcement and get the download from the Firebird website....

After a lot of head scratching, I was finally able to accidentally duplicate a mapping issue reported to me by a reader of the Rough Cuts version of my book, Programming Entity Framework . Then after a lot more head scratching, I was able to discover the pattern and workaround for this problem, which...

Marco Poponi will be "the EF guy" at the DotNetUmbria meeting next Friday that covers different ORM options. There will also be an Intro to ORMs, an nHibernate talk and a summary to help attendees compare and contrast ORMs. So if you are near Umbria, Italy, check it out....

Along with Stored Procedures, you can bring UDFs into an EF Entity Data Model which also surfaces as a function in SSDL. Unlike Stored Procedures, however, a UDF is composable on the server side and this is reflected in its attributes. < Function Name="ufnLBtoKG" ReturnType="nvarchar"...

In EDM misconceptions , Alex James wrote about something he and I discussed at DevConnections - a diagram in one of my slides that says "EDM" where he thinks it should be "EDMX". But I beg to differ (respectfully, of course :-)) about the representation in the diagram. Here is the offending diagram that...

Srikanth Mandadi of the ADO.NET Entity Framework Team has begun a series on dealing with big EDMs in Entity Framework v1 on the ADO.NET Team blog. Working With Large Models In Entity Framework – Part 1 This is an important problem that needs some good guidance for solving and I'm very happy to see this...

With my permission, Simon Segal has put together a bunch of tutorials that I have written in my blog as a single PDF. He had done it for himself and asked if it was okay to share. Here's a link to his blog post. Julie Lerman Entity Framework Tutorials consolidated Perhaps I'll get his PDF and put it...

A few years ago at DevConnections I had a long talk with Gert Drapers (from the SQL Server team) about EF when it was still in an early beta. I'm now at DevConnections in Las Vegas and caught up with Gert again and had an interesting follow up conversation about EF now that it is released. I really like...

Ever the avoider of controversy, I've kept my head down for the past week so I could finish getting my book into the hands of the copy editor. Of course, now I'm preparing for next week's presentations at DevConnections , including a full day of EF on Monday. Which is why I haven't really said anything...

I have been maintaining a consolidated list of Entity Framework Resources on the Learn Entity Framework website, which is the site for my book. I dubbed the site name before we had the final name for the book, which is Programming Entity Framework,but kept "learn" since it is shorter. :-) On the page...

I just returned from conferences in Amsterdam and Bulgaria where one of the sessions I presented at both conferences was an Intro to Entity Framework. Entity Framework is a vast topic and I struggle with how to approach a 60 or 75 minute intro session. I have contemplated doing a baby-step intro session...

Camey Combs is trying to choose between a few different titles for her Seattle v4 Code Camp (Nov 15-16) presentation on Entity Framework. I like "What's the EFing Big Deal?" What do you think? Go vote on Camey's blog or better yet, go to the Seattle Code Camp and attend her session! I personally know...

How great is that session title? I'm happy that I don't have a session scheduled at the same time that Alex and Paul are doing this talk during the SDN Conference in Amsterdam next week. If the session is as entertaining as the title, it will be quite a lot of fun to attend! (Of course, it is likely...

Although I mentioned this in a blog post last month about the DevTeach early bird special pricing, I thought I would highlight this to see how quickly we could pack the room! :-) Not that the prospect of a full day of EF shouldn't be enticing enough. But I thought that it would be nice to reward like...

I saw this thread early this summer and have spent hours looking for it since. Since i just came across it, I thought I would make a blog bookmark to it. Multiplicity of 0..1 and SQL eager loading problem Here's what the thread is about. When you query an entity that has a parent, for example an OrderDetail...

Roger Jennings wrote about this (well, ranted is probably a more appropriate word ;-) ) last week. I finally came across it today and see why he was so annoyed. I am revising all of my early book chapters to line up with the release version of Entity Framework. In doing so, I am going through all of...

I've written a 14-page article (that's pretty long!) comparing DataSets, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. It's in the current issue of CoDe Magazine. Read more here... [A New DevLife post]...

Not all CLR methods can be used when building LINQ to Entities or LINQ to SQL queries. The method needs to be something that can be expressed in the native query language. So if you have a date field, you can't use ToShortDateString in the query since there is no equivalent. You'll get runtime exceptions...

If you are not a comp-sci major, mathematician, DBA or something along those lines, there's a term in the Entity Data Model that might make you cross-eyed when you read it. Function Name="InsertContact" Aggregate="false" BuiltIn="false" NiladicFunction="false" IsComposable="false" ParameterTypeSemantics...

I picked my head up today from what I've been focused on and took a look at my blog feeds and was happy to see that Jarek Kowalski had a new post. He doesn't write a lot of blog posts, but they are generally pretty juicy. This one didn't disappoint. Persistence Ignorance (POCO) Adapter for Entity Framework...

by way of Alex Andrew Peters is joining the EF team . Funny to see all of the comments about the growing numbers of kiwis (is it PC for a non-kiwi to use that term?) at Microsoft. :-)...

For some background, check out a previous post called " Where's my Foreign Key?" I came across a scenario where I have a foreign key for an entity in the form of an ID. And the scenario is in a web page. I need to turn that ID into an EntityReference, but I don't think that it's fair to ask...

If you create an Entity Key on the fly: dim ekey= New EntityKey( "NWentities.Customer" , "customerID" ,1234) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre{ font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/}.csharpcode pre { margin...

This just popped into my inbox. IdeaBlade has released their EF version of DevForce. DevForce EF is our latest product supporting Microsoft's LINQ and the Entity Framework. It carries forward most of the features and all of our experience from DevForce Classic dating back to 2001. Why so special? Full...

There are a number of things in Entity Framework where if you don't know exactly what to expect, you will get bad data. The lack of implicit lazy loading is one of those things for developers who have come to expect that behavior based on their experience with other ORMs. That was intentional on the...

Prompted by Roger Jennings' post Entity Framework Instantiation Times with a 120-Table Database , but with limited time to do a thorough investigation, I did a quick trial this morning comparing AdventureWorksLT with it's dozen tables/views to another model with about 400. There are a few up-front costs...

Unfortunately, the datadeveloper.net website is "in between hosts" and we are still waiting for the owners of the site to place it elsewhere. That means that now that EF has RTM'd and a lot of people are suddenly looking for help, the tutorials that I wrote are not there to help out. I've recovered six...

The Northwind database has 27 tables and views. AdventureWorksLT has 17. Sound like your database? Probably not. What have people who have been pushing the designer with databases with hundreds or even thousands of tables & views been experiencing? According to Noam Ben-Ami who is on the team that...

From Microsoft Entity Framework Supported Mapping Scenarios Writer: Asad Khan Published: July 2008 Applies To: Entity Framework Summary: This white paper enumerates the supported mapping scenarios in Entity Framework. It also mentions important design considerations for store schema in order to deal...

Naturally, these are on my mind because my hand still stings from getting slapped by the runtime when I tried to do this. LINQ to Entities does not support projecting into known types structures. Note, I tried this first with a structure, then saw the forum thread which I quoted below that I apparently...

The Sept/October 2008 issue of CoDe Magazine contains an article that I wrote highlighting some of the major differences between DataSets, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. As long as the article is, and it is the longest I have ever written for CoDe at 14 pages, of course it was impossible to cover...

I've created a site that will eventually be used for my book, Programming Entity Framework. Before I had a book title I had started out using LearnEntityFramework.com then pointed ProgrammingEntityFramework.com to the same spot. In the long run the urls just point the thedatafarm.com/learnentityframework...

The starting point for EF in the online documentation is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399572.aspx This will help! You'll need to dump your Internet Explorer Temp files if you are not getting SP1 documentation. Otherwise you'll see Beta 3 and it will be obvious. Here is a screenshot...

I spend a lot of time in Reflector learning about Entity Framework but here's a very oddly named (yet descriptive, don't you think?) method I missed. In EF, when your entities are being managed by the objectContext, relationships are defined by separate objects. In order to build a graph, the context...

On the ADO.NET Team blog: Third Party Provider Support for the Entity Framework RTM I found this video a few weeks ago from Sybase on YouTube of all places where they talk about SQL Anywhere 11's support for EF when someone had emailed me asking about SQL Anywhere support. SQL Anywhere 11 supports the...

On the ADO.NET Team blog there's a list of changes between SP1Beta & RTM: What's new in the VS 2008 SP1? The designer got over 200 bug fixes including a bunch that help with source control and a few of the annoying validation error messages that are incorrect (and send you chasing down a problem...

The release of Visual Studio Service Pack 1 today (currently available for MSDN Subscribers to download), marks the RTM of Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services. It's been a long haul for EF, initially shown off in early 2006. ADO.NET Data Services, or ANDS as I've seen Shawn Wildermuth call it...

Don Kiely has been preaching the evils of Full Trust in .NET, SQL and Windows for quite a while. SO when he saw a question on the ASP.NET Forums on using the Dynamic Data Controls with EF as the data provider that involved a trust issue, he was on it like white on rice. Dynamic Data with the Entity Framework...

This may only mean something to about 10 people on the planet, but I thought I'd share it anyway. If you are using Entity Framework's MetadataWorkspace to dig around in the model's structure, the CSpace (schema from the conceptual layer aka CSDL) is readily available however, the other collections, SSpace...

Even though I seem to have gotten it right when I wrote about this in my book (I just checked) in my own memory I have had a misconception about GetObjectbyKey. I thought that GetObjectbyKey and TryGetObjectbyKey only searches the cache for entities that already have been created. But I realized this...

I am copying (and slightly modifying so that it is not out of context) a forum post that I wrote to put here in my blog. Here's the original thread if you are interested. When working with object services, you can query data using  LINQ to Entities or ObjectQueries with Entity SQL. Unless you specifically...

I have been writing gobs of Extension methods for entity Framework through the course of writing my book. I was inspired by this forum thread to create extension methods to overload existing methods in the APIs. One pattern that was annoying me was that frequently when I'm using the GetObjectStateEntries...

Mike has posted a bunch of ADO.NET Data Services videos up on Channel 9. Even though I haven't had a chance to check them out yet, it's easy to presume that these are going to be as great as all of his other screencasts. http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/UK He says there are more to come. Enjoy....

I learned a neat ESQL trick from Danny Simmons today. The most basic Entity SQL expression is one that would simply query for a single entity with no filters, no projection etc. context.CreateQuery<Customer>("SELECT VALUE con FROM MYEntityContainer.Contacts AS con") You can actually express...

Someone posted a question in the Entity Framework MSDN forum asking for an example of overriding SaveChanges. I thought I had posted one in an early thread but couldn't find it. Nor could I find an obvious example anywhere on the web, so I thought I would put one here on my blog. There aren't a lot of...

A few months ago, Brian Dawson gave us a look at a bunch of perf tests for querying with ADO.NET and Entity Framework. Exploring the Performance of the ADO.NET Entity Framework - Part 1 Exploring the Performance of the ADO.NET Entity Framework – Part 2 ADO.NET Entity Framework Performance Comparison...

I've seen this quote in many of the recent discussions of the evils of Entity Framework. In the comments to Sebastien Lambla's , blog post, Danny Simmons explains: The goal is not one model to rule them all. The goal is unifying the way you specify models in many tools to be the same. That way you can...

Dinesh uses humor (laced with a little well deserved sarcasm) in response to "the sky is falling because Technology X doesn't fit my way of programming" .... Design of LINQ to SQL - What was I thinking or was I?...

A few months ago I came across this great interview with Jimmy Nilsson where he is talking abot LINQ and Entity Framework. I love what he says about LINQ - that it's a beatiful thing and it's small & compact. And I'd been very curious to know what Jimmy thought of EF since I missed my chance to meet...

Anyone who knows me knows that I just LOVE being in the middle of a controversy. Well, that's a lie. I sure know how to pick'em, though, eh? I have to deal with java and open source people (many who I am friends with, respect and admire) harassing me because I use Microsoft products. I have to deal with...

"Eager Deferred" is a bit of an oxymoron, but let me explain. Example: You have queried for customers. For particular customers you want to get their orders AND order details. customer.Orders.Load will only get the order entities. But what if you wanted to do something similar to Include in there? eg...

Matthieu has written a very clever method extension that allows the important eager loading method, Include, to accept a lambda expression (strongly typed) rather than a string for its parameter. I like this better than my method of ensuring that I type the strings correctly, which is to start entering...

What will ADO.NET 3.5 look like with the release of VS2008 & .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1? See if this image makes you think: "Oh, right! Hadn't thought of it that way!". [A New DevLife post]...

In Beta3 of Entity Framework there was a teaser in the properties window for Entities and their properties. We saw properties for Access, Getter and Setter but they were inactive. With the latest bits (available in the VS2008 SP1 Beta) those properties have come to life. Here's what you'll find and where...

I meant to mention this in my last blog post ( An excerpt from my book about eSqlBlast ) which is that with the new Entity Framework bits, the schema files that are generated when you build your EDM project are embedded into the assembly by default. Yet eSqlBlast depends on files that are accesible via...

eSqlBlast – Entity SQL Query Helper I could not have figured out some of these more complex Entity SQL queries without the help of a tool called eSqlBlast written by Zlatko Michailov (in his free time) who is the Program Manager for Entity SQL. The tool is available on Code Gallery along with a number...

I have been learning a lot about EDM QueryViews lately, though more of what I'm learning (the hard way) is what you can't do with QueryViews. Most of what you'll find documented about QueryViews is to replace mappings so that your resulting entity is read only. But there are more uses for QueryViews...

I was getting ready to suggest this feature because it's a pain to "move" properties if you are deriving types or doing entity splitting. I actually use the method of going into the EDMX file and copying the properties around in there so that I don't have to worry about the attributes and facets. Especially...

The SP1 Beta does not include updated documentation for Visual Studio 2008, but it is all online. You can start here: http://vs2008sp1docs.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx A direct link to EF documentation is: Entity Framework The tools documentation is not contained within there. Instead it is...

While I was in the middle of a flurry of conference prep and travel in April, I got an email pointing me to an interesting blog post by Dave DeWinter who is using T4 Templates to generate entity friendly CUD stored procedures. Why "entity friendly"? Because of a number of rules enforced by the model...

I hadn't noticed this before. If you have a stored procedure that is mapped to an entity such as "GetCustomersSince" which returns Customer entities, the command is executed when you create the query, not, like with normal queries, when the data is first needed. In case that sentence was too...

I'm definitely interested in what people have to say about Danny's post so I have subscribed to the Bloglines citations of it: http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=bcite:blogs.msdn.com/dsimmons/archive/2008/05/17/why-use-the-entity-framework.aspx RSS Don't forget the comment thread in Danny's post as well...

In the earlier bits, if you changed an association to an inhertiance, the type that becamse the derived type lost its mappings and th emappings for any associations. Depending on how complex that type is, recreating all of that could be challenging. I just tried this out in the new bits and the mappings...

If you have screwed up your Entity Data Model, you may be familiar with safe mode when you try to open the model up in the designer. But the mapping designer has Safe Mode now, too. Here is what I get when I am in the middle of creating an inheritance in my model which means that some of my mappings...

Having just done a presentation at DevTeach called ".NET 3.5 Data Access Guidance", which I will be doing again at TechEd in a few weeks and I have a CoDe Magazine article on this topic coming up as well, it is definitely interesting to me to see what is probably the first somewhat official looking ...

Along with Soma and others, the ADO.NET team has announced that the next beta of Entity Framework is available with the VS2008 Service Pack 1 BETA bits . The Astoria team already has a list of changes on their blog and there will be one coming for EF as well. In the meantime.... Never a dull moment....

I have found myself explaining this in conference sessions so I thought I would write it down in my blog. Entity Framework has a Golden Rule. Though shalt not do nuttin' that the developer has not explicitly told you to do. The lack of implicit lazy loading is one of the more notable (and hotly contested...

Like Jeremy Miller, who has Transparent Lazy Loading for Entity Framework on his Christmas Wish List , Timothy Khouri does not like the fact that Entity Framework doesn't support Lazy Loading. However, since he really likes Entity Framework, he wrote some code that will enforce Lazy Loading for him....

Entity Data Models have a lot of rules. They are necessary for the integrity of the model, though if you are not familiar with depth of EDMs and *why* these rules exist, many of the mapping rules may seem to make no sense when it comes trying to implement them. This gets hairy when you are mapping stored...

EntityStateObjects, to me, are one of the most important little pieces of the EF puzzle. IT is the EntityStateObject that maintains all of the critical info for change tracking. But it's hard to get the big picture of what's going on in there when debugging because all of the important stuff is delivered...

Along with a few hundred other DevConnections attendees, I got a sneak peek of the EntityDatasSource control on Monday during Danny Simmons' Entity Framework Architecture session. I think I paid more attention to the control than what Danny was saying because I was desperate to see how it was set up...

I was experimenting with creating data services from IQueryables. Rather than use the canonical example of creating a set of 3 person objects on the fly and exposing them, I decided to create a service for my application log. (Not something I plan to expose to the web, just a learning tool ;-)). I created...

While this has been an unfolding process on Ruurd's blog and on the CodePlex/EFContrib site, today marks an impressive day in the evolution of the PostSharp4EF project that Ruurd Boeke has been working on. He has used the available interfaces for IPOCO in Entity Framework to create a tool for using Entity...

These things tend to happen when I'm travelling and don't check my feeds for an entire day. I can't say this is a huge surprise since it's very sensible. I'm happy to finally have some tangible news from the team. I'll be happy to share this news in my Entity Framework workshop tomorrow! During the conference...

In my previous post, I managed to update a simple model from an existing database. But then I started trying to do things like build my project and ran into so many problem trying to get my simple model to interact with the AdventureWorks database that I finally gave up. I actually wrote my thoughts...

When you use the UpdateModel feature of the Entity Framework design tools, the process relies on matching up existing entity names to table names, more specifically name of objects in the CSDL with names of objects in the database. IF you have selected objects to add and nothing with that name already...

August 2008 Note: the datadeveloper.net site is "in between hosts". I am not responsible for this site, just a contributor. I don't have access to the tutorials but I have found some copies of them and am putting them here: www.learnentityframework.com/tutorials . I've written a set of Entity Framework...

August 2008 Note: the datadeveloper.net site is "in between hosts". I am not responsible for this site, just a contributor. I don't have access to the tutorials but I have found some copies of them and am putting them here: www.learnentityframework.com/tutorials . I've written a set of Entity...

The return type of a LINQ query is an IQueryable, even a LINQ to Entities query. Here is a screenshot of a LINQ to Entities query at design time (code is NOT being debugged). But when the query has been processed, it's no longer an IQueryable, but an ObjectQuery. What's going on here? At design time...

I was fiddling with compiled queries yesterday and thought I would share what I saw as results. This is anything but laboratory benchmark testing so take it for what it's worth. I did only a very simple query to start with, finding SalesOrders whose total is greater than a given number. You can do this...

I was fiddling with compiled queries yesterday and thought I would share what I saw as results. This is anything but laboratory benchmark testing so take it for what it's worth. I did only a very simple query to start with, finding SalesOrders whose total is greater than a given number. You can do this...

The MSDN forums for data access have been restructured a little. Entity Framework & LINQ to Entities questions: The one which has always been under " MSDN Forums » Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) » ADO.NET (Pre-release)" has been renamed to MSDN Forums » Visual Studio 2008 (Pre-release) » ADO.NET...

EFExtensions , released on CodeGallery earlier this week by EF team member, Colin Meek, has a lot of brainy goo in it. So far I've looked at the pieces that Colin has explained in his first post (first post ever) about the Extensions. While most of the extensions in the first part of his post are replicating...

Roger Jennings wrote a dizzying (in a good way) post about stored procedures that I have not even had the chance to absorb yet but it's about creating database procedures after the fact that can be easily used with the entities and associations defined in your model . Coincidentally, Noam Ben-Ami wrote...

In the EF forums, Danny Simmons lets an EF RTM cat out of the bag . And, this looks like it has the possibility to be bigger than just for EF. The EF team worked with the WCF team to make ENTIRE GRAPHS serializable, and in an interoperable way. If you look at Ruurd Boeke's blog post, Circular references...

It's great to see Colin Meek finally blogging. Colin has been a wealth of information on the MSDN Forums for Entity Fraemwrok related questions. It is also COlin who posted teh Entity Framework Extensions on CodeGallery a few days ago. Colin talks about the extension in his first post and how they can...

Because of a bug in the way the schema files are created, the behavior for embedding the model into your assembly and the impact on using that assembly in other projects is a little funky. This will change with the next iteration of the EF that we will see as it has been fixed. In the meantime, there...

Cool - two in one day! Another goody on the ADO.NET Entity Framework & LINQ to Relational Data Code Gallery page ... Entity Framework Extensions Library . I'll subtitle this as "stuff we couldn't get into v1, but know you need"! The first one today was a tool to help you visualize what different...

There's a new very cool tool on MSDN Code Gallery from the EF Team called EF Mapping Helper . What it does is allow you to select various mapping scenarios (eg. TPH Inheritance) and the helper will display a visual image of what the mapping does and the actual XML of the CSDL, SSDL and MSL so you can...

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...

I am in the terribly pathetic position of having to try to let people know about my workshop because it was inadvertantly ommitted from the printed brochure which has been inserted in the past few issues of MSDN Magazine and aspNetPRO magazine. My workshop is listed on the website and the online schedule...

[thanks to Roger Jennings for the correction about spatial data] Samir Bajaj, a developer on the Entity Framework team has begun his blog with a bang. He describes a sample application (available on MSDN Code Gallery) that can switch between LINQ to SQL or ENtity Framework, highlighting the differences...

While many of us are still struggling to get our entity objects across tiers, keep change tracking in place, keep graphs together, DevForce seems to have figured it out. They are now touting their new DEF ( DevForce Entity Framework ) which going into Beta 1 soon. You can sign up for the beta and check...

Confession: I had never heard of Microsoft Master Data Management before seeing Jamie Thompson's blogpost, MDM -> Entity Framework -> ADO.Net Data Services. Better together? . MDM is a BI tool created by a company called Stratature, which Microsoft acquired in June. Jamie writes more about that...

Ruurd Boeke had an Entity Framework tool he was writing and wanted to share, so he created a common project on CodePlex that can be used as a container for any other ENtity Framework projects that people are working on. IT's called EF Contrib . Ruurd is working on an easy way to implement IPOCO in v1...

I recently had a fun chat with Carl and Richard about my favorite topic, the ADO.NET Entity Framework. It is now online at www.dotnetrocks.com . ( http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=319 ) And just for fun, the first person (who I have not already told privately) who can identify a particular...

One of the points Faisal made in his post Coming soon to LINQ to SQL is that there will be support for the new types in SQL Server 2008 in the next release (SP1?). It made me wonder if the LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL will gain these before Entity Framework is released? One of the benefits of Entity...

A while back, Pablo Castro had created a PopFly block from an Astoria service. It no longer seems to work, presumably because he created it with the preview bits, not the CTP bits. I want to use a Popfly example in my upcoming DevConnections session Web Mashups with ADO.NET Data Services , so I decided...

Some of the best info about Entity Framework is buried in the forums . I wanted to surface a few important things. 1) From Danny Simmons on January 28th responding to a question about RTM , while Danny is forced to repeat yet again "first half of 2008" he drops some great info about another build to...

Earlier today I recorded a DotNetRocks show with Carl and Richard where I got to go on and on and on about Entity Framework for a whole hour (which flew by in what felt like 10 minutes). Richard's heavy DBA background made for some really interesting questions. One issue that really stands out is that...

I mentioned a few days ago that Matthieu Mezil will be presenting on Entity Framework at TechDays 2008 in Paris next week. There are more at this conference! LINQ & Entity Framework: Fabrice Marguerie & Sebastien Ros ADO.NET Data Service: Mitsu FUruta & Pierre Lagarde There are also a bunch...

One of the major accomplishments of EF Beta3 was that the performance of materializing objects through Object Services (that means with Linq to Entities or with Entity SQL) was improved significantly. So significantly that they are almost comparable with querying through EntityClient which streams data...

In my post about rewriting Brad Abram's MVC + Entity Framework example in VB , I pointed out a better way to query a collection of objects and return their entity references (eg, query products and bring along the category information) without writing a scary query filled with references, checks for...

Oh now I am really excited. I've been very interested in ASP.NET MVC but have been trying to stay focused on learning Entity Framework. Now I get to have my cake and eat it too, as Brad Abrams just posted a sample of using the two together . I'm off to try it out!...

Mike Pizzo from the Data Programmability team is doing a webcast on Wednesday. MSDN Webcast: Programming LINQ and the ADO.NET Entity Framework (Level 200) Event ID: 1032364888 Register Online Language(s): English. Product(s): SQL Server. Audience(s): Developer. Duration: 60 Minutes Start Date: Wednesday...

I thought I would give the Xceed WPF DataGrid (it's free!) a whirl with Entity Framework databinding. So far I have only explored the basics - no anonymous types or sprocs and I am only working with a READ-ONLY scenario. (I did notice something in their docs about being able to modify and delete but...

A question came up in the EF forums today asking if the delay of SQL Server 2008's release will mean EF will be delayed. The two are not related. There is a misconception that Entity Framework is tied to SQL Server 2008. It's definitely not. These are .NET APIs and will work with many database providers...

Danny Simmons has posted the code for his EntityBag class (aka "Perseus") on the MSDN Code Gallery Site here . I grabbed it last night and set up a test project so that I could see what the payload looks like. The results of that test are in this blog post, Testing out the EntityBag . There were a few...

Zlatko wrote the eSQLBlast tool. Danny 's been writing Extension Methods and the ENtityBag class. There is also a new tool for examining how code generation is done from an EDMX file. (As well as a blog by Sanjay about how code gen is done .) All of these and future stuff are now collected under one...

I've been fiddling with the EntityBag that Danny Simmons wrote . My biggest interest was in how big the payload is. I created a service that had two operations. The first returns "Hello World" and the second returns an EntityBag for an AdventureWorksLT SalesOrderHeader graph that includes it's SalesOrderDetails...

My last post was about LINQ and EF Data Providers , which made me think of this. I received an email recently asking if I knew of anyone writing an Entity Framework provider for Access. I don't happen to know of any. However there's a reason. In the forums, there is a post from July where Danny Simmons...

People are always asking "when will I be able to use LINQ against databaseA or databaseB?" and "when will I be able to use Entity Framework against databaseA or databaseB?" In my mind this is the same question, though most who are asking don't realize it. Why? An Entity Framework provider gets all of...

It seems to me that Danny Simmons must be working on v2 of Entity Framework. The posts he has written in the past week are examples of things that would probably have been in V1 had they had the time and resources. Now they are winding down v1, building up the team and thinking about v2. Danny has written...

I've been thinking about the EntityDataSource that has been mentioned in the forums. It is something that is going to be added to Entity Framework by RTM, but it doesn't exist in current bits for us to experiment with. The reason I've been thinking about it is because of some of the issues/confusion...

A few weeks ago, I was mooning over Extension Methods . Somehow, in the collection of language enhancements to VB9 and C#3, they have become a bit of a sleeper feature in light of LINQ. Everything is though, right? So I wrote about them and thought about them, but then went back to my task at hand. Danny...

As per Jaroslaw Kowalski on the EF team: "We are working with SQL Server CE team to get an updated version of their provider that will be compatible with EF Beta3 out soon. It is a matter of weeks" source: MSDN forums...

Entity Framework easily supports mapping to read stored procedures when the query results match up with an existing entity in the model. If your query results don't, then you have to create a new read only entity and entity set in teh CSDL and a new "fake table" entity and entity set in the SSDL and...

Jonathan Carter was very interested in Entity Framework and Astoria. Last month, he started working for Microsoft as an Technical Evangelist . So he gets paid to share his excitement about these and other .NET technologies. Guy Burstein was very interested in Entity Framewrok and Astoria writing lots...

I've been snooping around the web and found links for many of the db vendors (and 3rd party vendors) to try to watch their own news about what they are doing for Entity Framework. Here's Dave Sceppa's list of companies working on EF providers and interleaved with his list are my best stabs at a blog...

No, it's not what you think I was going to say... But David Sceppa from the EF team is working on one and it's on the MSPress website! Which made me go to amazon and look some more and wouldn't you know I found a few more... Not surprised that Roger's at work on a book! Perhaps there will be more......

I have spent a lot of time thinking about Entity Framework in web applications and in SOA and worrying about performance, serialization and concurrency. But I haven't spent a lot of time worrying about these things with respect to client apps (winforms and WPF). In a great thread started by Nick in the...

I wrote a series of Astoria posts based on the preview and have been thinking about updating them for ADO.NET Data Services, but it seems that it would be pretty redundant considering that we have three great resources already doing the same: Mike Taulty has two posts now in a series: ADO.NET Data Services...

Note: This blog post explains theory as well as steps to implementing the stored proc. If you read my blog regularly, you are used to this. 11/30/09:Anoter note! Don't miss the fact that this is for the verison of EF in VS2008 SP1. Things have been greatly improved in VS2010. Check out this *much newer...

I thought I saw this a week or so ago but couldn't find it again, but it just appeared on David Sceppa's blog. "It" is a list of vendors who will have Entity Framework providers out within 3 months of Entity Framework's release. While Oracle is not on there DIRECTLY, there are 3rd party companies working...

Zlatko Michailov has been posting some awesome stuff on his blog. There are two that I want to highlight. The first is because it helps me answer a question I am often asked is explaining why Entity Framework is not an ORM and how it compares/contrasts to ORMs . The second is announcing that his tool...

Note: With the RTM of Entity Framework, the model's Metadata Artifact Processing property is set to Embed in Output Assembly by default, whcih is the opposite of what is described in this blog post based on Beta 3. One of the new features in Entity Framework Beta3 is the ability to embed the csdl, msl...

I've been using the GetObjectStateEntry method for a while so that I can view and interact with the state of a particular entity that I have in hand. Today I used the plural version of this method for the first time and boy do I like it! GetObjectStateEntries takes as a parameter an EntityState enum...

One of the changes with the new CTP release of ADO.NET Data Services (formerly Astoria) is that you can create a service against any iQueryable, not just Entity Framework. This is huge. Roger Jennings points to Guy Burstein's how-to with Astoria (I guess it's time to update my own now outdated posts...

I've done this demo many times in conference and user group sessions. Someone on the ADO.NET forums asked how to do it and I thought I would just do a quick tutorial with screenshots. What this Tutorial does is demonstrate how to create and use a data source from a particular entity in the model. I'm...

After I left Seattle, rather than going home as I had planned I ended up going to my parent's house (where I still am) to attend a funeral after which I was whisked up to Canastota NY where my mom was camped out with two pregnant dogs (Celeste and Bumper) near her fabulous vet (Village Vet in Canastota...

I attended Zlatko Michailov's talk on Entity SQL today at DevTeach which was definitely interesting to me. In showing Entity SQL queries, Zlatko used a tool that he built as an experiment that evaluates Entity SQL queries (with some intellisense help as you type them!), displays the resulting provider...

I learned today about Diego Vega who is another new hire on the Entity Framework team. Diego is responsible for Linq to Entities. As EF grows, there are more and more specialized people on the team. So now we have Zlatko who is the Entity SQL PM, Alex who owns the Entity Data Model and Diego will be...

I find that people really want to tell me what's wrong with Entity Framework. This is a good thing. It's how I learn. It's sometimes a little overwhelming, but since I feel like I'm just the messenger, I don't take any of it personally. So go ahead. Tell me why you don't like Entity Framework. Why you...

*Update* It turns out that I completely misunderstood Zlatko Michailov's email reply to me when I was having trouble with this. I seem to have freaked out the team by writing this errant blog post. Sorry guys. When using ObjectQuery, I was doing this: Dim myAWEntities=New AdventureWorksEntities dim myObjQuery...

I sometimes feel like Gretel picking up tidbits on my way to the Gingerbread house when it comes to getting clues about what's coming in Beta3 of Entity Framework. The next two I have found are: From Alex James blog, Entity Framework is getting compiled queries similar to what's in LINQ to SQL. You can...

As Entity Framework gets deeper and deeper, the responsibility of building and managing what will become Microsoft's core for data access must get divvied up. Alex James has recently moved from New Zealand to join the team as Program Manager for MetaData in entity framework. That does sound narrow, but...

Probably no need to mention that VS2008 RTM (Team Suite English) hit MSDN subscriber downloads this morning. But what about Entity Framework? According to Danny Simmons in this forum post , we'll have new bits that align with VS2008 RTM in a few more weeks. We're working hard to wrap up the last round...

Danny Simmons and Mike Flasko will be holding a 1/2 hour chalk talk on Architecting Entity Framework apps at 2:30 on Wednesday at DevCONnections. If you want to see all of the talks in the special Data Access track (Entity Framework and more) check this blog post where I have them all listed ....

I stole the little EF on Rails quip from Roger Jennings who asked on his blog "what the heck happened to Jasper?" (my words, not his) Here's an overview article on Jasper that I wrote a few months ago. Andy Conrad, who is a PM on that replied that it's still around and they have an internal revision...

Someone asked a common question in the forums today about being able to update an EDM when the datastore has changed . Noam Ben-Ami, who is on the team working on the tools, says this: We are hard at work on this feature right now and hopefully we'll be able to get it into CTP2 of the designer. Along...

In a recent ADO.NET forum post, someone asked how to do read-only views of data. There were two responses - use a QueryView and use a Defining Query. What's the difference? A Query view is an Entity SQL Query that exists right in your mapping layer. It allows you to solve two problems. THe first is creating...

With the current CTP of the ENtity Data Model Tools, there is no way to automatically update or refresh the EDM when a change is made to the data store. One of the beauties of the EDM is that fixing up the EDM in these cases is not only easy, but it doesn't need to have any impact on your application...

I've found that the best resource for learning about ENtity Framework is in the forums. Today I finally saw a public statement about something I"ve been waiting for for a long time. Brian Dawson says: We've been working on making the WCF experience, especially with relationships, a much better experience...

I had to figure this out, so here are a billion screenshots so anyone who wants to do this will have an easier time of it! One of the niceties about being able to customize your conceptual models is not having to bother the dba while they are doing important things like indexing tables and optimizing...

This article, Introducing ADO.NET Entity Framework , which I wrote for CoDe Magazine is now online. You can find it in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue which is currently on newsstands (and highly likely to be at available at your local .NET User Group.)...

I have been subscribed to this blog for Zlatkov which has was phased out in July and I didn't know he was going to resurface in a new blog. I just happened to come across that today! It is a focused Entity SQL blog blogs.msdn.com/esql...

If you can't make it to DevConnections in Las Vegas where there will be a Data Access track with a whole bunch of Entity Framework session ( check it out ) and the reason is because you live over on the other side of the pond, there are a bunch of EF talks at TechEd Europe. Mike Taulty lists them here...

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing when I would choose querying an data through an Entity Data Model using LINQ to Entities vs. Object services + Entity SQL vs. EntityClient + Entity SQL . One of the advantages I pointed out about using EntityClient is that it returns datareaders and does not...

In his " Microsoft's Data Access Strategy" blog post, Mike Pizzo, who is an architect for the overall Data Programmability team at Microsoft says: "The Entity Data Platform is a multi-release vision, with future versions of reporting tools, replication, data definition, security, etc. all being built...

The title is a bit of a misnomer and not comparing apples to apples. To do it right would have been longer. The real comparison is "Choosing LINQ to Entities vs. Entity SQL+Object Services vs. Entity SQL+EntityClient" When doing an intro session on entity Framework last night for GUVSM in Montreal, even...

While this is not online yet, I do have the latest issue of CoDe Magazine in my hands which has (among some other great articles!) an intro article I have written on Entity Framework. I originally wrote the article using VS2008 Beta1 and Entity Framework beta1, then (as it always seems to happen) the...

Even though I'm still a Unit Testing luddite, I've been looking around to see how people are getting LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework to work in their Unit Testing scenarios even though neither technology is really built to test against well. First, I found this excellent post by Ian Cooper that explained...

The MSDN Events Tour for Q4 runs from Oct 16 - Dec 31 and hits 51 cities (including Burlington, VT!). One of the sessions is about Astoria* and it is called "A New Paradigm for Data Development with Web Based Data Services". Astoria sits on top of Entity Framework, and the session will also give a brief...

I've been playing with using EF object in code-behind of aspx web pages. The first issue to hit is postbacks. Entity Objects are Binary Serializable so they can be stored in ViewState. Like many other objects, you need to put your entities into viewstate (I'll deal with session and application caching...

Another challenge in working with tiered solutions (notably web services) that require xml serialization of entity objects is that the xml serializer does not serialize the entire graph. It only gets the main object and drops all of the relations. This is not because Entity Framework is trying to be...

One of the biggest challenges with Entity Framework for updates is that if you want to move objects across tiers, you lose the object's state. All of the state and change tracking information is maintained by the object context. While entity objects are serializable (xml and binary) and can be transported...

Erick Thompson is at SQL PASS and will be doing a talk on Entity Framework for DBAs tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon. You can get a preview of what he will be talking about by reading his recent post on the topic ....

Just a quick pointer to Pablo Castro's announcement that a new CTP for Astoria is out that will work with vS2008 Beta2. An important note, this is a refresh of the CTP, which is based on the early prototype. The actual production code that they are working on is a totally different set of bits. Hmm,...

I was fiddling with Entity Framework in a website and was happy to see how smoothly objects serialize (binary serialization) across postbacks. Query for one customer along with their SalesOrderHeaders: Dim query = (From cust In aw.Customer.Include("SalesOrderHeader") Where cust.CustomerID = 151) Grab...

I was happy to see Danny's blog post this morning that he'll be coming to DevConnections . He's not even presenting. But since there will be an entire Data Access track (a day of 4 microsoft talks and then 2 days of third party speakers) and in that track there will be 8 talks that will either be about...

If you've been playing with Entity Framework and used the wizard to create a model from an existing database, you'll see that the resulting model looks something like this which is a small portion of the EDM built from Northwind. Compare the Orders Entity above to the Order table schema and you'll quickly...

When you build an EDM from an existing database in Entity Framework, you can get Views & Stored Procedures in addition to tables. You'll find that if you select Stored procedures, you will also get your functions. The stored procedures are only defined in the storage layer. The return type is not...

[Update at bottom of post] I wrote this in response to a question on the ADO.NET Orcas forums and thought I would copy it here. Note that Danny Simmons writes more information about Entity Framework and DataTables in the thread. Here's my solution for now... LINQ to Datasets does allow for conversions...

While Jim Wooley is looking at performance in LINQ to SQL , I've finally pulled the VS2008 installation on my VPC out of the mysteries of SQL Server Express and installed SQL Server Developer Edition so that I can look at my queries as they come into profiler. Note that this is all based on VS2008 Beta2...

The new Entity Framework tools create an EDMX file which contains all three models: Conceptual, Mapping and Storage, in one file. When your project is built, individual files are created for the models, in the [familiar to those who have been using Entity Framework already] CSDL (conceptual), MSL (mapping...

Just to see another aspect the before and after difference of serializable EntityKeys in the Beta2 of EntityFramework, I simply stored a single Customer entity into viewstate, posted back and then looked at the entity in debug to see that yes, the EntityKey is there. I went back to my Beta1 VPC and when...

In the forums, Craig Lee responds to the problem reported in this thread : We are planning on releasing an FAQ of known issues, but here is a preview to see if this helps you. Issue Visual Studio displays a Package Load Failure error message for Package 'Microsoft.Data.Entity.Design.Package.MicrosoftDataEntityDesignPackage...

I have not been able to stop thinking about EntityKeys, serialization and web services since my post about them yesterday , so I have done a little more experimentation tonight. ObjectContext does have an AttachTo method. In my scenario of the incoming object from a web service client, the EntityKey...

#1 Complex Types #2 Span [Include] The next things in the list of what's new in EF Beta 2 that I have been experimenting with are: Entity key serialization In previous CTPs EntityKey objects were not serializable, now they are. Increased persistence ignorance in entity data classes We are continuing...

[ #1: Complex Types ] The next item in Danny's list that I wanted to look at was this: · Better support for span over LINQ to Entities queries The span feature makes it possible to pre-fetch related entities. In previous CTPs span was specified through a property on ObjectQuery<T>, but in this...

I saw complex types in the March CTP of Entity Framework and tried to implement them but found out the hard way that the functionality wasn't fully implemented. Here's the forum thread from that time . So Complex Types were the first thing I wanted to try out on Danny's list of what's new in Beta 2 ...

The first thing I wanted to look at after I downloaded the new Entity Framework Beta2 and Tools CTP was the EDM Designer. The designer is displayed as the result of opening up an EDMX file. The EDMX file is the wrapper for the three Entity Data Model files (CDSL, MSL, SSDL). Therefore, you need to create...

I just came across this interview on the INFO-Q website . I like how they do this. Short questions and answers. Each q/a has a video clip, where you can watch and listen to the subject of the interview and simultaneously read the text of the question and answer. That makes it really easy for me to paste...

At DevConnections this fall, I'm going to do a post-con, 1/2 day workshop to provide some guidance over which Data Access options in .NET 3.5 are right for you now that we have MORE choices coming out. Do you use classic ADO.NET? LINQ to SQL? Entity Framework? And if Entity Framework, do you use Entity...

Some of the best Entity Framework info is currently living in the MSDN forums. Mike Pizzo is the Principal Architect on the DP (Data Programmability) team . Today, Mike wrote a lengthy response to yet another query on "what is the difference between linq to sql and Entity Framework". At DevConnections...

In the same MSDN forum thread that I referred to in my post " Beta2 - Where's Entity Framework? ", Danny Simmons says (with my emphasis) Believe me, if there were some way to release it sooner with the level of quality that is needed and including the first CTP of the designer which we have promised...

Since this spring, the Data Programmability team has been clear that Entity Framework is going to be developed along side of VS2008, but won't be part of the VS2008 install and that Entity Framework will be released after Visual Studio 2008 releases (during the 1st half of 2008 is the narrowest timeframe...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...