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.