Thanks for attending the ONETUG Brown Bag meeting today where I did a quick look at various approaches to working with EF: database/model/code first, working with POCOs and legacy classes and talking about range of using EF in RAD apps to a more architected enterprise app.
You can find my PowerPoint (which I kept losing thanks to not bringing along my Live Meeting manager) at http://www.slideshare.net/JulieLerman/perspectives-on-ef. The slides are a little more of the zen presentation style… not much in the way of bullet points/details. If you are trying to get the meat of the presentation, it won’t be of much use. Sorry.
The application I showed at the end (MVC app with various projects for entities, model, repositories, testing, interfaces) is from Chapter 27 of my book, Programming Entity Framework 2nd Edition. You can find the sample code for that chapter (as well as others) on the downloads page of my book website.
If you watched the presentation, I had a strange problem when I was trying to modify the model to line a property name up with my POCO class. The original name was “Name” and the new name was “RoomName”. There was an error indicating that the model still had “Name” which was not true.
The reason for this was because I was using a solution that I’ve used for a number of demos and it had a phantom DLL in the bin directory with a different version of the model, a version that was still using “Name” for that particular property. EF was most likely finding that embedded model first, hence it’s complaints. Once I deleted all of the bin files and rebuilt, things worked as expected. Cleaning the solution did *not* do the trick. I had to explicitly delete those files. These things only happen when you are presenting live and it’s being recorded for posterity. I have made my monthly sacrifice to the demo gods.