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The main driving factor for us using EF4 in our application is so we can easily support multiple databases (please refer to EF4 Part 1): we currently use Microsoft SQL, and we have a client that wants to use Oracle.
Although multiple provider support is used to promote EF4, there is surprising little about that provides a clear guide on how to achieve this goal...
I thought I would write a short post with a very specific title in the hopes that it can serve as a beacon, a shining light for fellow ‘idiots’ who are wasting time on a relatively simple, yet mostly undocumented matter.
It is fairly common to require ‘calculated properties’ on a business object, but have found this seemingly simple requirement to be quite interesting in practice with EF4...
Now that we’ve done all the hard work creating hooks and interfaces in previous posts creating the actual Selector is relatively simple.
In this post we are quickly going to discuss the need for a consistent way for our binding controls to let our selector class know exactly what to project. I will illustrate the problem by comparing the telerik controls RadComboBox and RadGrid.
In this part we will derive from ObjectDataSource to put in place a hook that our selector can latch onto. When delving into the workings of the ObjectDataSource it also became clear that we have to also override the ObjectDataSourceView that it uses. The location of the hook actually sits here.
When upgrading to use Entity Framework we are also in the process of trying to change all appropriate business layer calls to IQueryable – the main point of which was so that our UI can define specific projections on the data as it needs. Unfortunately we found no way that we could attach to a BL using some kind of DataSource and have this projection capability. So this post is out to create one.
I have just been tasked with looking into a new way to architect one of our main ASP.NET applications tiers, since we are moving it to Entity Framework 4. There are a few goals that we would like to achieve:
This is just a short post on an interesting issue I ran across recently.
In this post I’m going to talk about extending EF entities to encapsulate common functionality. For this particular case I will expand upon the concept in this blog post
EF4 Part 2: EDM Inheritance Pains.
Entity Framework 4 (EF4) currently supports three inheritance models: Table per Type (TPT), Table per Hierarchy (TPH), and Table per Concrete Type. Given that the existing database schema I am working with mainly implements TPT, we’ll take a look at some of the issues you may experience when trying to map this to your model...
With Entity Framework 4 (EF4), when we are defining our Entity data model (EDM) we can make use of inheritance and abstract classes rather than the simple mapping that you get when using the DBML designer we get with LINQ-SQL. However, it is not without its limitations…
When the first version of Entity Framework came out, I really liked the concept but felt that it lacked too much to be a real-world solution. However, with the relatively recent release of Entity Framework 4 (EF4) I think it has reached a point where serious consideration should be paid to using it as an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework for your applications...
So it has been a while, but I do have a decent excuse. My son was born on the 16th of July, and I resolutely ignored everything for a while so I could soak up the experience!
This experience can also be linked to my intentions for my next series of blog posts – soaking up brand new experiences, and discovering new (and hopefully exciting) things!
Phew it’s been a while but I better get back into it! In the final part of this series I will be going over what we can do client side when we want to query our services. Because of the nature of WCF Data Services to detach our client objects from our server ones this is more of a general discussion about its querying capabilities.
It’s been a while since I blogged as I’ve mainly been updating an existing application to use .NET 4, so there has not been anything of massive substance that has inspired me. However, I have been impressed by some of the lovely ‘simplifications’ introduced in this version of the framework.
There is a wealth of new features in this version of the framework, ranging in size from major additions like MEF and EF4 through to seemingly minor items like Dynamic. Here are some of my favourites...
We use RadGridView fairly extensively in one of our WPF application, so when it comes to making common changes to this control it saves a lot of time and effort if we can minimise the number of places we need to make such modifications....
Planet Software are long-time users of Telerik controls, and one of the nice modules they provide is called RadCompression...
I am going to come back to Part 1 in this post and see how we can leverage the business repository classes and the T4 text generator to create automatic service points. This means we would never have to touch the service layer as it will automatically grow as we added repositories.
In this part of my WCF Data Services Custom Framework series I will implement the IUpdatable interface in our WCF Data Services container. I will do it in such a way to take advantage of the business entities and repositories created in Part 2.