On Friday, I did a full day workshop on Entity Framework called Entity Framework 0-60. Well, I translated it into the local measurement and renamed it 0-100 (km).

One of the comments I got back from an attendee was:

“It was a great overview on a really interesting topic. It was a bit more complex than I expected so it was good to get the expert’s view”

“A bit more complex.” This is definitely one of the things that makes EF so difficult to teach or to write about. Even in 6 hours there’s so much that I have to glaze over. I tried not to linger in introductory information which they can get more easily elsewhere and spent more time teaching some of the things that are not so obvious and harder to grasp. The last 45 minutes was free form as I invited them to pick my brain and take advantage of all that I have learned so far. I plan to do that again in upcoming workshops.

I think one of the critical things I shared with them during the day was something that is also common to any LINQ queries, which is that you can very easily and unknowingly make trips to the database when you think you are just looking at only the cached objects. When I first mentioned this, the room went silent and their eyes got very big, so I realized that I better spend a little more time exploring this than I had planned.

I’m doing this workshop again this coming Sunday at DevConnections in Orlando (still seats available!) and I expect the day to transpire very differently than it did in Sweden this past Friday. I even completely reorganized the slides on my way home from Sweden because I learned a lot from the questions and reactions of Friday’s attendees.

Yes, Entity Framework is complex. And, as the day progressed, I surprised myself with how much I have really learned about this technology. And I seem to have a Rolodex in my head with listings of forums threads and blog posts that I frequently referred to which was very handy.

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