A friendly reminder about the UserVoice site where you can suggest and vote on features you’d like to see in Entity Framework (http://data.uservoice.com/forums/72025-ado-net-entity-framework-ef-feature-suggestions) or in WCF Data Services (http://data.uservoice.com).
The EF team is wrapping up work on changes to the core EF APIs that will be part of the .NET 4.5 release. We’ve had access to the preview of these new features since June 2011. Here’s an MSDN Magazine article reviewing some of the most prominent features that you’ll find in there: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh394151.aspx.
But EF continues to evolve. The team pays close attention to the suggestions developers make (and vote on) on user voice. In fact, it’s a bit of a popularity contest. If one feature suggestion has hundreds of votes, it will get a lot more attention from the team than a suggestion with only 10 votes.
Here’s a look at hot suggestions.
Top 10 Suggestions Overall
Improved SQL Generation (status=Started) 1204 votes
Batch CUD support (status=Under Review) 981 votes
EF Support for Second Level Cache (status=Under Review) 535 votes
Entity Designer: Speed up & Optimize for using with ~200+ entities 453 votes
Support for multiple databases (status=Under Review) 441 votes
Designer Support GUID as Entity Key 429 votes
Schema Migration a la Rails Migrations (status =Started (Code First Migrations)) 406 votes
TPT (Table-Per-Type) Inheritance Performance (coming in .NET 4.5) 369 votes
Allow filtering for Include extension method (status=Under Review) 319 votes
Allow default date = NOW and provider.MinDate in CSDL (my suggestion 
) 216 votes
(this isn’t as much of a problem now with code first, but for EDMX it’s still an issue)
There are currently 276 overall. Some have been completed. Some may be duplicates. But if there are features you care about getting into EF, take a look at the list and vote and *promote* the ones you care about.
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I want to see Microsoft’s SharePoint group to adopt EF as its standard data access technique for all content. If that happens, it will be the best indicator that EF "is for real" within the Microsoft Enterprise "technology stack". If not, it tells me that EF is just another "shiny toy" that works great in stand-alone applications but isn’t worth learning for day-to-day SharePoint custom development.
Hi Fred,
I’d recommend putting your suggestion on the uservoice that will be read by many not on my blog read mostly just by me 😉
I want to see a bulk insert method like SqlBulkCopy
I’d really like to see Code First be much more performant. I really like the development experience, but most of the micro-ORMs such as dapper run circles around it at run time. It’s great for throwing together a quick prototype, but so far, it’s been my experience that it’s better to wrap it in a repository so that it’s relatively easy to swap it out for straight up List(Of T) populated from raw ado.net once you get past the prototype stage.
Other important improvements:
data.uservoice.com/…/2140735-entity- data.uservoice.com/…/hot
when the hell is it going to support encryption well? I’ve been waiting since version 1. How is anyone using this in secure environments? How is this not at the top of the want list?Is this for "toy" apps only? What do you do Julie when you are using EF and have to encrypt columns and data? Just wondering… thank you
code first: some inheritance strategies TPT, TPC require changes to the OO object model.
I suppose the necessary source code changes like additional FKs or table annotations could be generated automatically.
Something like Fluent NHibernate. ?
Thak you.
Full and Complete Support for Code First EF.
Really, in order to use Code First, there must be a automatic implicit migration strategy. I simply change the C# code that is acting as a Model, and EF will take care of the Database without losing any existing data.
Futhermore, Code First needs to be fully supported by WCF RIA.
It will be nice to have Code First= Code Complete= NO workaroudns, tricks, special download and undocumented patterns to get around.
Thank you and Cheers 🙂