IUpdateable from Eric Nelson

Summary of the Entity Framework 4 changes introduced with Beta 2 and CTP 2

Eric Nelson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:38:03 GMT

I thought it would be useful (at least to me!) to summarise the new stuff in Entity Framework 4 given it actually comes in 2 parts.

The list is a simplified and categorised version of this and this.

General

Foreign Keys now added: EF 4 now includes a new type of associations (Foreign Key Associations) that allow you to have Foreign Key properties on your entities. They are the default although the EF v1 Independent Associations remain.
Lazy Loading on by Default in new Models: Also name change from Beta 1. context.ContextOptions.LazyLoadingEnabled = true is placed in the constructor
Support for Binary Keys: The EF now allows you to have binary property types (and varbinary storage columns) mapped as Entity Key / Foreign Key.
ObjectMaterialized event: Can write logic that is executed immediately after an object has been materialized.
Improved Database Generation: SQL CE support has been added plus customization of database generation is significantly simpler.
More Improvements to the generated SQL
LINQ to Entities improvements

POCO

Improvements to POCO Support: Automatically fixes nav properties and FKs on DetectChanges and SaveChanges. Collections can also be declared as ISet<T>
EntityDataSource support for Query Extenders and POCO: EntityDataSource now includes support for the new ASP.NET Query Extenders and POCO entities.

Self Tracking Entities

Object Services API improvements to enable N-Tier and Self Tracking Entities: ObjectStateEntry.GetUpdatableOriginalValues method provides a access to an updatable data record that you can use to establish the original state of an entity at the property level.
Works with Foreign Key associations: Including Fix-up logic has been tidied up to be aware of FKs.
Support for Silverlight 3 via WCF
Better Silverlight and WPF Databinding support: Generated entity types now implement INotifyPropertyChanged and use ObservableCollections
Richer concurrency control support: Original values are preserved for all required properties according to their concurrency mode in the Entity Data Model.
Fewer Round Trips: The approach for managing entities with dangling references has been reengineered to avoid unnecessary database round-trips.
New and improved methods: AcceptChanges, StartTracking, StopTracking where added and the existing MarkAsX methods are now extension methods.
Generated code improvements and refactoring: The ApplyChanges implementation has been moved to the Context template.

Code Only

Fine Grained Control over model: Specify Navigation Property Inverses, Property Facets and Complex Types
Customizable Mappings: Change Table and Column Names. Support Custom Inheritance Strategy. Enable Entity Splitting and Join Table Mapping

Designer

Navigation Property Management: Users can now delete and add navigation properties, enabling the creation of one-way associations.
New Extensibility APIs: New APIs enable custom code to run on model wizards etc.
Auto Generation of Complex Types from Stored Procedures: Plus auto update when a stored procedure definition changes.
Greatly Improved Facet Management in the Designer

The relationship between Entity Framework 4 betas and ctps explained

Eric Nelson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:14:09 GMT

There seems to be enough confusion about the betas and ctps of Entity Framework 4 to warrant a brief post. Hopefully this should clear things up nicely.

Put simply:

Most of Entity Framework 4 (EF4) will ship with .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 (.NET4/VS2010), however not all of it will.
Most of EF4 is therefore in the beta releases of .NET4/VS2010, however not all of it is.
The missing bits of EF4 appear in EF4 Feature CTP releases “soon after” the release of a beta.

Right now (Nov 6th 2009), we have:

A fairly old .NET4/VS2010 Beta 1 + Entity Framework Feature CTP 1. CTP 1 only works with Beta 1.
- CTP1 adds:
  - Self Tracking Entities
  - POCO Templates
  - Code Only
A very recent .NET4/VS2010 Beta 2 + Entity Framework Feature CTP 2. CTP 2 only works with Beta 2.
- CTP2 was released 4th Nov 2009
- CTP2 adds:
  - Lots of new stuff to Self Tracking Entities
  - Lots of new stuff to Code Only
  - Does not include the POCO Template from CTP 1

The missing POCO template stuff will be resolved in a future CTP.

Beta 2 of EF 4 added a fair amount of new features, as does CTP 2. Therefore the obvious right choice to go with is Beta 2 + CTP 2 – but expect breaking changes to your code. I haven’t tried looking into taking the CTP1 POCO stuff onto Beta 2 but it should be doable. However the “in built” POCO support in Beta 2 is far better than Beta 1, hence (I assume) not all the templated code is now needed.

P.S. In case you were wondering, I am doing my TechEd session using Beta 1 + CTP 1 as Nov 4th was just too late for me to switch over plus I didn’t really have any space in the session for the new Beta 2/CTP 2 stuff anyway!

The Plan B is all my DEV305 Entity Framework 4 demos as slideware

Eric Nelson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:29:00 GMT

Next week I will be presenting Entity Framework 4 at TechEd Europe. At least that is what I hope to do. However my Lenovo T61P seems to have some other plans.

A year back the screen packed in. The nice IBM man replaced it. All was well.
Last week the screen packed in again. The nice IBM man replaced it. All was well … with the screen.

However since then I am getting blue screens (whenever I really don’t want them) and drive errors and the odd bit of corruption of files. I need to flatten – but now is not the time.

As it happens my demos rely on a large file (a 14GB Virtual Machine) and on not blue screening.

I therefore needed a Plan B. The ideal Plan B would be a second reliable notebook. But that isn’t an option.

Therefore I have settled on:

Keeping my fingers crossed
Taking the VM on an external drive and have asked for a spare demo machine at the event. But I am on at 9am and fly in 9:30pm the eve before. Not ideal.
Capturing 90% of my demos as screen shots in a ppt (which i liked as a least the effort would also be useful for some future EF 4 blog posts)

I have uploaded the demo slides on slideshare. They have been highlighted with “digital ink” in places which slideshare appears not to cope with. But the file should be fine if you download it.

Dev305 Entity Framework 4 Emergency Slides

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Entity Framework 4 Session DEV305 at TechEd Europe 2009 – what to expect

Eric Nelson — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:25:52 GMT

Next Monday (9th Nov 2009) at 9am I will be delivering an overview of the new stuff in Entity Framework 4 at TechEd Europe. The session is DEV305 and the description reads:

ADO.NET Entity Framework in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (catchy?)
This presentation offers an in-depth discussion demonstrating the new capabilities of the Entity Framework that will ship with Visual Studio 2010. The second release of the Entity Framework focuses on addressing two primary customer scenarios: Domain-Centric application development (TDD/DDD) and the traditional Data-Centric Web application "Forms over Data". This is an in-depth feature overview covering: N-Tier, T4 Templates, POCO, FKs, Mapping, Metadata, etc

Like many of these things, the description was written some time back and this time around I didn’t even write it :-) I am doing broadly the above but the session would be better describe as a “Lap around the new stuff” with some mention of TDD/DDD.

If you are thinking of popping along, carry on reading:

Pre-requisites:

I do assume you have already looked at Entity Framework (EF) v1 or some other ORM
- If you haven’t looked at ORMs at all you should still learn some stuff and I do plan to start with a 5 min “intro to ORM and EF”
I assume you haven’t yet looked at EF 4 (at least not in any depth)
The session uses C# throughout – but the code is simple stuff in the main.

What it covers:

Very brief into to ORM and EF
What was wrong/missing/annoying/damned ugly with EF v1
The main new bits of EF v4, specifically…
Better Tools and Design Experience
- Model First, Template code gen, Complex Types…
More powerful/flexible runtime
- Deferred Loading, Entity Functions, SQL improvements…
Drill into
- Persistence Ignorance/POCO
  - Roll you own, using the templates
- N-Tier
  - Using the templates for self-tracking entities
- Code Only
  - No model development
Brief mention of where we still have work to do (IMHO)

How it does it:

Lots of (hopefully) easy to understand stand-alone demos on each technology area
Lots of console apps!

What is doesn’t show:

Using EF4 with other technologies such as WPF4, ASP.NET
Dig into TDD/BDD other than to recognise it is now much easier to do with EF v4

Should be a good session.

MSDN Flash Podcast Show 011 – Steve Marx on Windows Azure

Eric Nelson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:27:02 GMT

Also knows as “that’s where I left my shoe” (you will need to listen to understand that)

This is a bonus edition of the podcast recorded on the 6th of October in London with Steve Marx, Technical Strategist working on Windows Azure.

It starts slow, it needed a few edits (deletes!) as we battled with “what is still not public” but picks up to be a pretty useful look at the improvements we have made to Windows Azure over the last few months with a specific focus on storage.

Topics covered include:

Entity Group Transactions
StorageClient library
Queues
Blobs and Shared Access Signatures/Blob Container Access Policies
Communication between nodes without queues
Logging

Show Links:

Subscribe:

Subscribe in an RSS Reader:

Subscribe in ITunes:

Or:

Download/Play MSDN Flash Show 011

UK MSDN Flash Poll for November 4th: How excited are you about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4

Eric Nelson — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:30:07 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for download – but are you excited?

Picture of me

Eric Nelson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:34:58 GMT

Someone on twitter just asked - “I like your caricature but what do you really look like”. Brace yourselves!

1st the caricature:

Which was done from this shot from a couple of years back (notice how the double chin vanished in the drawing – sweet):

Now the real thing, me taken in August at “the mothership” in Reading:

Free WPF, Silverlight and 3.5 SP1 training for UK Developers

Eric Nelson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:57:22 GMT

At the start of 2009 we worked with InnerWorkings to help over 7000 UK developers get access to free training in C# or VB. As there are at least 100,000 UK developers (depends who you ask), we decided to again partner with InnerWorkings to bring you free training in WPF, Silverlight and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. I am a big fan of the InnerWorkings approach which embeds a set of programming challenges into the Visual Studio IDE. Maybe not for everyone but certainly is an interesting and engaging alternative.

We have provided three distinct training programmes in both C# and Visual Basic to help you get up to speed with many of the new capabilities in Visual Studio 2008. Each programme contains between five to 12 hours free training covering:

Developing Rich Internet Applications with Microsoft Silverlight

The drills in this developer programme cover advanced techniques for using Silverlight 2 (Silverlight 3 content is on the way), Microsoft's cross-platform technology for developing rich, interactive applications on the Web. The drill activities instruct users on how to use managed code and to work with data.

New Features in .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

.NET 3.5 SP1 includes a number of new features to help you build sophisticated applications in less time. This Developer Programme introduces LINQ, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data and ADO.NET Data Services.

Developing Rich User Interfaces with Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides developers with a programming model for building rich Windows applications that incorporate UI, media, and documents. This developer programme introduces some important features of WPF, including fundamental controls, resources, user controls and 2-D transformations.

If you missed out the first time around, then sign up today (Sign up for any to get access to all – we just want to understand your primary interest)

Visual Studio Myths – busted wide open

Eric Nelson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:58:55 GMT

The team and I were having a conversation about developers (we do that from time to time). It went something like:

“Isn’t it a shame that so many developers are stuck on Visual Studio 2005 when Visual Studio 2008 would be way better for them and Visual Studio 2010 is just around the corner”
“Why is that?”
<LONG CONVERSATION LISTING EVERY REASON DEVELOPERS ARE ON 2005 DELETED>
“And… then there are all these myths that developers believe to be true which hold them back from adopting Visual Studio 2008. For instance many developers believe that …”
<LONG LIST OF MYTHS DELETED>
“OK. What can we do to help them?”

Well, after several iterations of ideas on how we could do our little bit to address this, we decided to go with collating:

All the key feature improvements from Visual Studio 2005 through to Visual Studio 2010 by focus area (web, data etc)
All the myths we heard in our meetings and events, plus some we made up to pad it out :-)

And then, with a little help from an agency, we created a Silverlight 3 application which presented the information in a way that developers will hopefully find rather useful and a little prettier than the whopping bit word document we created.

The final result is the Visual Studio Myth Busting Matrix.

This is a release candidate – both of the application and the content. The Visual Studio 2010 content is based on Beta 1 and will definitely be updated for Beta 2. We are really, really keen to get your feedback. We would love to know:

If you had any problems using it.
If you found it useful.
Any myths it busted for you.
Any answers to myths you disagree with.
Whether you think it is useful format vs more traditional approaches (For instance, we could do a version for your managers to help them see why you would be more productive using the latest tools)

And most importantly any features or myths you think we missed.

Feel free to contact me through my blog, through twitter or just tweet with the tag #dotnetmyth which we will be watching.

Enjoy.

P.S. And it does have spinning balls. Which I know MikeT (See rant!) and MikeO particularly admire :-)

Using the Myth Buster

Hopefully all is reasonably obvious.

Select a version of Visual Studio (2005/2008/2010)

Choose your focus (Rich Client, Web, Data, IDE etc)

Expand Features

Click on “read more” to… read some more

Expand Myths

Optionally, tweet the myth out if you think it worthy (we are using #dotnetmyth as the tag)

David Chappell in conversation in the UK about Windows Azure and the cloud

Eric Nelson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:11:17 GMT

David and I hosted David Chappell and Steve Marx in London on the 6th of October in a packed day with early adopters of azure (ISVs and System Integrators)

David interviewed David (!) and I interviewed Steve for our MSDN Podcast. Unfortunately the podcast with Steve isn’t yet published as it needs a few edits as we strayed into “secret squirrel” territory a few times :-)

Check out the video – its less than 15 minutes and David covers off Azure as well as Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, VMware and more.

Windows Azure Platform “free” for MSDN Subscribers and BizSpark companies

Eric Nelson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:51:07 GMT

Well not exactly free but definitely extremely welcome and a great benefit. The introductory offer includes a huge 750 hours of compute time – which rather nicely is how much you need to run a node 24x7 for the whole month. Another great reason to sign up for an MSDN subscription or to join BizSpark if you are a Software Startup.

NB: SQL Services is SQL Azure. I guess the naming change slipped through the review process for the site.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 now available – and launch date is set for March 22nd 2010

Eric Nelson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:15:32 GMT

I am not the biggest fan of Mondays but today is different. Today is a good day. Today we announced the availability of Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and revealed the official launch date:

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on March 22nd 2010

We have also tinkered with the packaging/licensing (to make things easier for you). We announced new packaging, licensing and pricing of Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN. The best bit (IMHO) is:

We include Go Live rights to allow you to evaluate in production environments.

The three main versions will be:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN – for team development
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN - for developers building high quality, scalable apps
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN – for basic development

For MSDN subscribers we also announced the following benefits:

Team Foundation Server 2010 - All 3 versions of Visual Studio 2010 listed above will include Team Foundation Server.
Windows Azure – Free usage hours of our cloud services platform including Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET services once the products become commercially available.
eLearning – complimentary eLearning up to 40 hours per year per subscriber.

Visit the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta site to download the Beta, submit feedback, go to forums, and find more information about the Beta.

I’m off to kick off a download. Have fun!

P.S. If you are not an MSDN subscriber, then the bits should be available on October 21st including the Express versions of Visual Studio 2010.

UK MSDN Flash Poll for October 21st 2009: Which platforms do you develop for?

Eric Nelson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:57:20 GMT

Nice and simple – but I think the results will be interesting.

MSDN Flash Podcast Show 010 – Paul Jackson on Memory Mapped Files in .NET Framework 4.0, using Oslo and learning to love the web again thanks to ASP.NET MVC

Eric Nelson — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:29:30 GMT

This podcast accompanies the October 8th edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter.

It is an interview with Paul Jackson which is meant to be about the article he wrote on Memory Mapped Files in .NET Framework 4.0 but tends to go off in different directions – but we both certainly enjoyed doing it :-) I was interested to hear how he was getting on with Oslo and why he was revisiting ASP.NET after many years of focus on XAML.

Show Notes:

WebsiteSpark Program
Microsoft Ajax CDN
Web Platform Installer Version 2
Web Toolkits series of screencasts
Casestudy on F#
Poll How many lines of code did you write yesterday?
Memory Mapped File .NET 4.0 preliminary MSDN documentation
Microsoft Oslo
Book Pro ASP.NET MVC by Steven Sanderson
Book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (with nerddinner sample) and the free chapter (pdf) from Scott Guthrie

Subscribe:

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Or:

Download/Play MSDN Flash Show 010

Slides and links from Windows Azure Platform Storage session

Eric Nelson — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:45:12 GMT

I delivered a session on Windows Azure Storage and SQL Azure Database at the UK Azure user group on the 6th of October.

A big thanks to everyone who attended – and for putting up with my last minute improvisation when we realised that 2/3rd of the audience were actually brand new to Windows Azure (and presumably therefore brand new to the user group)

Links:

www.azure.com Main site and where you register to get tokens. Remember you need separate tokens for Windows Azure and SQL Azure.
Or… a more streamlined registration portal for UK developers (only gets you Windows Azure, not SQL Azure)
The SQL Azure Storage tool I was using (which is extremely useful!) Cloud Storage Studio (Currently in beta)
A great online tool for working with SQL Azure – Omega
The podcast where I will publish the interview with Steve Marx on Azure in next week or so

I also have a longer version of this presentation with more info and learning on storage which I delivered at Software Architect 2009.

Storage in the Windows Azure Platform - ericnel

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