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 be used to handle a variety of Stored Procedure scenarios in Entity Framework.

For what looks like a pretty complete list of the blogs of the Entity Framework team and others on the Data Programmability team at Microsoft, see the Resources page of the DataDeveloper.NET website.

Thanks to Alex for the heads’ up….

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 are two things to keep in mind.

1) When you compile, even if you want the files embedded, choose the Copy to Output Directory option for Metadata Artifact Processing, then build, then change the option to Embed in Output Assembly.

2) If you make a change to the model and rebuild, after it is already being referenced by another project, you may or may not get the changes reflected in the assembly and therefore the client project will still fail. In most cases, doing the 2-step build will do the trick. In other cases, it is necessary to go into the bin directory of the model’s project and delete all of the schema files (csdl, msl & ssdl) or just delete every thing in there, then do the two step rebuild again.

As I’ve been working on samples over and over and over, and adjusting my model, I’ve gotten into the habit of doing this.

One easy red-flag that you need to do this is if you get an error message complaining about C-side vs. O-side. That means that something in the CSDL is different than the classes (O=Objects) that were codegen’d. So you while the assembly does have the updated classes, it doesn’t have the updated model.

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 types of mapping in an EDM do and what their schema looks like – EF Mapping Helper.

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 see what it looks like in the actual schema.

You can combine the mapping types to see how they all look together as well.

This is a huge benefit because sometimes it’s just hard to set these things up, therefore how can you see the impact. It’s a really great way to look at this – if you are not afraid to look at XML. 🙂 (Since the visual designer can’t do everything, it’s useful (to say the least) to know how to work in the XML.)

It will also give ideas of some of the cool things you can do with mapping in an EDM that you may not have thought about. EDM’s highest power is in it’s ability to really shape your conceptual layer in ways that you can’t do with traditional ORMs. But learning all of the different ways to customize a model can be daunting. So I’m really happy to see this tool!

Here’s a view of a TPH mapping (click on image for full size)

and a view of a model that contains a TPH and TPC (table per concrete type). It’s quite dizzying, so I’d recommend looking at individual mapping scenarios first.

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 sniff sniff). They have extended the EDMX by adding additional attributes (which apparently won’t prevent the model from being used elsewhere) and replace the objectContext with their own object manager.

I’m really impressed. Because they already had their framework that they could plug EF into, they are light years ahead of me, who is starting from scratch trying to figure out how to make EF do these things on it’s own – which in some cases is not an easy task.

Some of the things that DEF can do that I am struggling with are

• Use objects across tiers
• Use objects across tiers without needing EF on the client
• Roll back changes to the object cache
• Query the object cache without hitting the database.

There’s more, but it’s too depressing to keep listing. I’m just kidding about it being depressing. I’m actually very happy to see someone prove that the EDM and the Entity Framework can be used (even if it takes some tweaking) in real enterprise applications.

I’m also a little envious. It would have been fun to work on this project with all of the resources and existing IP they had at their disposal.

Check out the video.

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, but not in the printed brochure, so I think lots of people who may be interested, will not even be aware of it.

This is the start of the full Data Access track at DevConnections. We’ll have non-stop data access sessions for four straight days!

Here is a link to the Pre-Conference Workshop page.

SO here it is again:

VPR204: ADO.NET Entity Framework: From 0 to 60 (9:00am – 4:00pm)
Add’l Fee $399
Julia Lerman
This full day workshop will provide you with a full overview of the soon-to-be released ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft’s new core data platform. In this workshop, you will learn what the Entity Framework is and how it fits into your application and enterprise architecture. We will begin with an introduction to the Entity Data model, how to build it, and how to implement it in its simplest form. Then you will learn how to take advantage of the true power of the Entity Data Model by creating customized mappings and implementing it in real-world multi-tier architectures. You will learn how to query Entity Data Models using LINQ to Entities, Entity SQL with Object Services, and stream data with Entity Client. The workshop will also explore some of the more complex features of object services as well as offer guidance as to when and where to you will want to use the Entity Data Model and which of its core querying methods is right for different scenarios.

I’ll be doing this workshop in at the Developer Summit in Stockholm on April 11th as well.