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 we’ve been told so far).

In this April 28th post, Mike Pizzo states:

We will continue to ship CTPs and Betas of the ADO.NET Entity Framework that align with Orcas throughout the remainder of this year.

At the beginning of this month we saw how this works. There was a June CTP of VS2008 and a separate CTP of Entity Framework that had to be installed on top of Visual Studio CTP.

I also know that the Beta2 of Entity Framework will be vastly improved over what we saw in the June CTP, so I am very eager to get my hands on it.

So why is it that when I downloaded Beta2 yesterday and opened it up, I still had this hope, this expectation that Entity Framework would be in there? Why was I so disappointed that it wasn’t? Foolish girl.

Since for some reason, I wasn’t able to log into the forums on my computer, when I finally tried it on a different computer (after two days of being “stuck”), I saw that Danny Simmons clarifies the timing:

Since the Entity Framework is now shipping separately from Orcas, the Orcas beta 2 does not include any Entity Framework bits, and unfortunately the existing CTP will also not work with beta 2.  We will, however, have a beta version of the entity framework sometime in August that will work with beta 2 (and have some additional goodies <grin>).

So I’ll have to just keep a stiff upper lip and entertain myself with some of the many other new toys in VS2008, fiddle with Astoria or maybe even just do some of my client work!

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