Daily Archives: March 28, 2007

What to expect in next (and future) Orcas bits for Entity Framework

Data Access

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 sql query will force the ObjectContext to load up an object’s entire hieriarchy without having to call Load after the fact to get related data. This seems to be available in Object Services but not through Linq to Entities. Hopefully an Extension Method will be created for Linq to Entities to give us access.
  • The EDM Wizard will display Views and Stored Procedures when building an EDM from a database. Then these will be part of the schemas.
  • Referential Contraints will work the way you would expect. For example if your db has a referential constraint to delete child records when a parent is deleted, EDM will pick those up. I don’t know the details here but am assuming we will have some granular control over this.
  • ToList may not be necessary in the future and serialization will be implicit.
  • Beta 2 will have something (new to me) called IPOCO… Interface for Plain Old CLR Objects
  • QueryViews – ooh baby ooh baby. Create your own views in the mapping layer.
  • Associations between sub types.
  • There will be a way to convert existing strongly typed datasets to entity schemas. Unfortunately either Erick (who I got this from) misunderstood the question or I misunderstood the question or I misunderstood the answer. Darn.

At the same time as DevConnections, VSLive was happening in San Francisco. (Quite unfortunate scheduling…) Britt Johnston did a keynote and showed [a video of] the latest prototype of the EDM Modeler and also let us know that it won’t be ready for Orcas but they plan to release it shortly (?) (well the quote from the ADONET blog post is literally “sometime”) after Orcas. This is really frustrating, but it is just the reality and as developers we know the difficulties of designing tools… so it is what it is and until we have it, I will learn a LOT with the XML and personally hold off on doing any seriously complex modeling.

See the ADONET Team blog and Data Blog for more on Britt’s keynote and links to the screencast on where the modeler is at today.

I did my ADO.NET Orcas overview talk yesterday to a full room (not a huge room, but still all the seats were filled which was great given that Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell were doing a live DotNet Rocks show with Scott Guthrie at the same time!). I love talking about this stuff even if I never seem to have enough time for all the cool stuff I wish I could show.