Sunday, September 28, 2008

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 9/22/2008+

Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles.

•••• Updated 9/28/2008 3:00 PM PDT adding VS 2008 SP1, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC 
••• Updated 9/27/2008 2:00 PM PDT with EF, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, SSDS
•• Updated 9/26/2008 8:00 AM PDT adding EF POCO update, Silverlight RC0, DD
• Updated 9/25/2008 12:00 noon PDT including newly announced PDC 2008 sessions

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

••• Julie Lerman’s No, I do not want Set in the name of my EntitySet post of 9/26/2007 echoes my Forcing Gratuitious Pluralization of EF EntitySet Names Was a Very Bad Decision post of 9/20/2008. Both of us abhor the enforced Set suffix for singularized EntitySets.

•• Jarek Kowalski released v1.03 of his EF POCO Adapter which focuses on n-tier scenarios and detached entities, according to his EF POCO Adapter updated (v1.03) post of 9/25/2008. Following are Jarek’s descriptions of the changes:

  • Added wrapper for ObjectContext.ApplyPropertyChanges() to IEntitySet<T>
  • Added wrapper for ObjectContext.Detach() to IEntitySet<T>
  • Fixed handling of detached/out-of-scope entities w.r.t lazy loading and attaching to other contexts. Lazy loading outside of scope will do nothing if the context had DeferredLoadingEnabled=false, otherwise will throw.
  • Added partial OnZZZCreated() methods on generated contexts, adapters and proxies to enable integration with 3rd-party extensions
  • Fixed code generation from EDMX.
  • EFPocoContext.EnableLazyLoading has been renamed to EFPocoContext.DeferredLoadingEnabled to better align with Linq to SQL and our plans for EF v2
  • Fixed adapter-POCO synchronization for complex types

You can download the source code from the MSDN Code Gallery’s Persistence Ignorance (POCO) Adapter for Entity Framework section.

Jarek’s previous posts about the EF POCO Adapter:

• Frans Bouma is interviewed by .NET Rocks! podcasters Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell "about his thoughts on the ORM revolution, his products, and the Entity Framework” in show #380. Frans’ interview starts at 14:00.

Frans says Microsoft has “put LINQ to SQL on the back seat,” which corresponds with the points I raised in my Is the ADO.NET Team Abandoning LINQ to SQL? post of May 23, 2008 (updated 5/23/2008). Carl Franklin also brings up Microsoft’s original position was that “Entity Framework is not an O/RM” at about 37:00.

• Julie Lerman’s lengthy “Data Access Options in Visual Studio 2008” article for CoDe Magazine became available online on 9/25/2008. It’s a must-read for developers who need to decide on one of the seven .NET 3.5 SP1 data access technologies her article describes.

Note: Non-subscribers can view Page 1 only until two months after publication.

Muhammad Mosa starts a new multi-part Entity Framework tutorial with Inheritance and Associations with Entity Framework Part 1 of 9/24/2008, which (paraphrasing Moses) covers building simple associations between two entities and writing custom code to retrieve other parts of the relation when inheritance is applied.

His detailed, downloadable sample project contains the following, fully illustrated (by screen captures) topics:

  • How to define a model with Table-per-Hierarchy Inheritance
  • Creating Sub Entities
  • Define Mappings
  • Define An Abstract Class

LINQ to SQL

••• Fredrik Kalseth’s DataContext Repository Pattern Example Code post of 9/27/2008 contains a link to download sample code for his Linq to Sql, Programming Against an Interface and the Repository Pattern of 5/5/2008 about which Fredrik says:

The magic that lets us run queries against for example IPage, is in the Cast<T> extension method in System.Linq. By using it, it allows clients to ask the Repository<T> method for IPage, which then through the mapping configured in the static TableMaps dictionary (where at application startup I've added the mapping between IPage and Page) gets translated into a request for the Page table from the context, and then finally cast back to a IQueryable<IPage> before being returned to the caller, ready for querying against.

His earlier, related The Specification Pattern and Encapsulation post of 7/12/2008 links to Nicholas Blumhardt’s Implementing the Specification Pattern via Linq post of 7/6/2008.

••• Matt Manela publishes a reader’s simpler method for SSCE 3.5 connection sharing in his SQL CE 3.5 with LINQ to SQL Revisited post of 9/26/2008. The original post was SQL CE 3.5 with LINQ to SQL of 9/8/2008. (Repeated in SQL Server Compact 3.5)

•• Simon Segal supplements the post below with LINQ To SQL - Going POCO and more……! Part 2 of 9/25/2008, which discusses accessor mutators for EntitySet and EntityRef types.

• Simon Segal generates a multifile assembly of his LINQ to SQL libraries for his POCO Custom Multifile Assembly and ReSharper post of 9/24/2008. His earlier LINQ To SQL - Going POCO and more…..! post describes his

Generic Repository approach [that] utilises POCO’s along with Specifications and Fetching strategies (an nHibernate concept). …

The idea of the generic repository began as an extension of the ideas expressed by Mike Hadlow in his article here which are derived from Ayende’s work here.

Simon discusses the design of his POCO generic Repository in his lenghty POCO improves inheritance for LINQ to SQL post of 8/26/2008.

• Damien Guard has fixed a few bugs in his Text Template Transformation Toolkit (v.74) on 9/25/2008 and there’s a new, corresponding version of my DamienGuardT4.sln project available from SkyDrive. For more details, see Bidirectional Serialization of LINQ to SQL Object Graphs with Damien Guard’s T4 Template in VS 2008 SP1, which was updated on 9/25/2008 also.

Nick Berardi demonstrates How NOT To Optimize LINQ Statements in his post about LINQ to SQL queries of 9/24/2008. Nick looked at the T-SQL generated by his complex LINQ to SQL query, which included a couple of let statements, and concluded 34 lines with three CASE statements was too many. His optimization reduced the number of lines to 16, but increased the execution time by a factor of 4.6.

Nick says:

The moral of the story is you probably don’t need to optimize your SQL query through LINQ, just keep it simple and optimize your LINQ statement and leave the rest up to the professionals at Microsoft who created the LINQ to SQL expression query generator.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

••• Charlie Calvert has returned to his LINQ Farm series. LINQ Farm: LINQ to XML and Line Numbers of 9/26/2008 shows how to indicate line numbers in XML Documents with help from an XmlLineNumbers project from XmlLineNumbers.zip in CodeGallery’s LINQ Farm section.

• Rinat Abdullin compares the performance of simple LINQ to Objects queries and hard-coded equivalents in his Some performance issues and caveats of LINQ of 9/25/2008.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

•••• Scott Hanselman offers a demonstration of jQuery 1.2.6 in conjunction with

  • ADO.NET Data Services and it's JavaScript Client Library
  • ASP.NET AJAX
  • ASP.NET AJAX Client Templating (Preview)

in his jQuery to ship with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio post of 9/28/2008. For more on Microsoft’s adoption of jQuery in VS 2008, see the Miscellaneous topic.

• Shawn Wildermuth reports about encountering performance problems in his online Silverlight 2 samples in his ADO.NET Data Services Performance Issues post of 9/25/2008.

The problem occurs with an Astoria query that retrieves many:one EntityRefs (Category and Supplier for each Product requested). Part of the problem might be that Shawn included the Category.Picture bitmap field in the query. LINQ to SQL, which is smart enough not to repeat T-SQL requests for objects currently in memory, doesn’t provide updatable Astoria objects out of the box. Entity Framework doesn’t support LINQ to SQL’s DRY (don’t repeat yourself) feature.

• Steve Maine will present Microsoft .NET Framework: Developing RESTful Services at PDC 2008:

Learn the latest features in Windows Communication Foundation for building Web 2.0-style services that use URIs, HTTP GET, and other data formats beyond XML. See how these features can be applied to AJAX web sites, "REST" applications, and data feeds.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

•• DLPanther announces plans for a series of articles about ASP.NET Dynamic Data in his ASP.NET Dynamic Data, The Next Data Revolution! post of 9/25/2008.

• Steve Naughton continues his exploration of new DD techniques with Dynamic Data Custom Pages with Ajax Control Toolkit Tabs of 9/25/2008, which describes the two most successful methods he found for creating a generic page with a DetailsView that shows the parent record and a set of tabs showing all its child records.

• Stephen Walther will deliver ASP.NET Futures: WebForms and MVC Advancements at PDC 2008:

Learn about future advances in ASP.NET like WebForms, MVC, AJAX, Dynamic Data, and dynamic languages.

• Scott Hunter will present ASP.NET: Dynamic Data 2.0 and Dynamic Data for MVC at PDC 2008:

The next version of ASP.NET MVC contains a new scaffolding feature based on Dynamic Data that provides a rich framework for creating data driven web sites. Learn how to quickly build a Dynamic Data web site using features like model level validation, field and entity templates, and scaffolding.

Mike Taulty reports about experiments with DD in his ASP.NET 3.5 Sp1 Dynamic Data post of 9/24/2008. He was surpised to find that VS 2008 SP1’s DD templates were limited to Dynamic Data Web Site (Entity Data Model data source) and Dynamic Data Entities Web Site (LINQ to SQL data source).

Steve Naughton updated An Advanced FieldTemplate with a GridView/DetailsView Project, the seventh episode of his Dynamic Data and Field Templates series, on 9/23/2008. Paraphrasing the updates:

The FieldTemplate now has ParentDetails and the ChildrenGrid FieldTemplate’s
ParentDetails no longer support Insert but they do support Update as before.

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS)

• Kim Cameron and Stuart Kwan will present Claims-Based Identity: A Security Model for Connected Applications at PDC 2008:

Claims-based security is the underpinning of many applications, services, and servers. This model enables security features like: multiple authentication types, stronger authentication on-the-fly, and delegation of user identity between applications. Learn how to use this model in .NET, how it integrates with Active Directory, how it works across platforms, how it works with existing applications, and how we use it at Microsoft.

SSDS v1 will use claims-based security from BizTalk Services.

• Lynn Ayres and Tore Sundelin will deliver Connecting Active Directory to Microsoft Cloud Services at PDC 2008:

Learn how to augment your existing IT infrastructure with Microsoft Services. Manage and secure end user access to cloud services using your existing investment in Active Directory. Enable end users to access cloud services through existing Active Directory accounts, the same way they access your intranet-hosted software today. Hear how to enable existing software to use new service capabilities without re-writes, and do it all through the use of open and standard protocols.

Gianpaolo Carrero’s Cloud Services Architecture symposium post of 9/24/2008 describes the Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground symposium on PDC 2008’s day four. Gianpaolo says:

We will explore a few examples of cloud-based infrastructure usage as part of an existing application, we will discuss the architectural tradeoffs as well as best practices resulting from that usage. We will also walk through detailed examples of ‘enterprise grade’ hosted application design. And finally we will go through emerging patterns that take into account the physical aspects of a cloud-based application that are often overlooked, such as bandwidth which happens to be not infinite and certainly not free at high scale.

David Robinson announced in his SSDS and SSIS…like peanut butter and jelly post of 9/23/2008 that Matt Masson has posted documentation and downloadable code for SQL Server Data Services Connectors for Integration Services on CodePlex. Here are the download links:

The Source and Destination adapters simplify downloading and uploading SSDS data by taking advantage of SQL Server Integration Services.

Roger Jennings explores two relational databases in the cloud in his SSDS’s Competitors: Oracle 11g and Sun MySQL on Amazon EC2 of 9/23/2008. Oracle 11g for the Cloud was announced by Amazon Web Services on 9/22/2008; cloud-based MySQL was announced (originally) on 5/8/2008 and didn’t appear to garner much interest.

The unadvertised special is a a shared AMI for Oracle Express 10g with Oracle Enterprise Linux available from Amazon.

More from ZDNet about the cloud in Sam Diaz’s Intel at Oracle OpenWorld: It’s about time - and the cloud post of 9/24/2008 from Oracle OpenWorld.

Ayende Rahien’s Amazon EC2 now offers RDBMS post of 9/23/2008 gives his take on the difference between Oracle and MySQL in the cloud. Ayende concludes “I found this to be extremely interesting.”

Andrew Whitten says the following about his 9/21/2008 post about the Pictures in the Cloud - SSDS demo app, available from CodePlex:

I’ve been having a bit of hack around to show how pictures can be stored by this kind of service. There isn’t any reason to use this over the other online photo sharing sites, but it demonstrates how to use the API.

SQL Server Compact (SSCE) 3.5 and Sync Services

••• Matt Manela publishes a reader’s simpler method for SSCE 3.5 connection sharing in his SQL CE 3.5 with LINQ to SQL Revisited post of 9/26/2008. The original post was SQL CE 3.5 with LINQ to SQL of 9/8/2008. (Repeated in LINQ to SQL)

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (General)

•••• MSDN Events Summer 2008 Resources offers the following downloads for Session 3 | Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1:

Miscellaneous (WPF, WCF, MVC, Silverlight, etc.)

•••• Scott Guthrie announces support for the jQuery JavaScript library in the ASP.NET MVC preview and future versions of VS 2008 in his jQuery and Microsoft post of 9/28/2008. Scott says:

We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as-is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.  The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license.

We will also distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide great Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design-time. …

The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be available as a free web-download in a few weeks (and will work great with VS 2008 SP1 and the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1).  The new ASP.NET MVC download will also distribute it, and add the jQuery library by default to all new projects.

We will also extend Microsoft product support to jQuery beginning later this year, which will enable developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases 24x7 with Microsoft PSS.

jQuery’s John Resig has more to say about Visual Studio’s adoption of jQuery in his jQuery, Microsoft, and Nokia post of the same date.

As Ayende Rahien points out in his On jQuery & Microsoft post of 9/28/2008: “[S]omething else that I didn't see other people pointing out":

This is the first time in a long time that I have seen Microsoft incorporating an Open Source project into their product line.

I am both thrilled and shocked.

Justin Etheredge’s $("Microsoft").append("excitement"); post of 9/28/2008 goes into much more detail about the impact of inclusion of third-party, open-source jQuery in VS 2008.

Rick Strahl announces the first of a two-part series of jQuery articles in his Introduction to jQuery Article posted post of 9/28/2008. Rick says the in the latter post:

Part 1 of the article is mostly a pure jQuery introduction and doesn’t talk about jQuery’s Ajax features or direct interaction with the server side and ASP.NET. Rather it focuses purely on many of the extremely useful client side features as well as the basic concepts of extending jQuery with plugins.

Part 2 then will talk about the server side integration with ASP.NET using various mechanisms to call ASP.NET content from raw page Ajax calls, to JSON Service callbacks, to using templating and even partial rendering against server side ASP.NET application. I’ll also talk about building ASP.NET components that integrate with jQuery. This article is based on my jQuery session that I’ve been giving at various conferences and user groups.

•••• Justin Etheredge provides a flow diagram for MVC requests in his ASP.NET MVC Request Flow post of 9/27/2008. Justin says he was unable to find a similar diagram on the web.

•• Scott Guthrie announced the release of Silverlight 2 RC0 for developers in his Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available post of 9/25/2008. Scott says:

You can download today's Silverlight Release Candidate and accompanying VS and Blend support for it here.  Note that Expression Blend support for Silverlight 2 is now provided using Blend 2.0 SP1.  You will need to install Blend 2.0 before applying the SP1 service pack that adds Silverlight 2 support.  If you don't already have Blend 2.0 installed you can download a free trial of it here. …

Over the next few months we will be releasing a lot of new Silverlight 2 controls (more details on these soon). Today's release candidate includes three new core controls - ComboBox, ProgressBar, and PasswordBox - that we are adding directly to the core Silverlight runtime download (which is still only 4.6MB in size, and only takes a few seconds to install):

He also says the final release will be “shipped … soon.” Get more details on the release from:

Beth Massi offers a link to the source code and slides for her Data Sources and Data Binding in WPF Talk in Redmond on 9/22/2008. Beth says:

I started the talk with basics of data binding to a variety of data sources and then we moved to more to data access discussions and n-tier architecture issues. It was similar to the talk I did at Bay.NET in SF last month but I focused this time completely on WPF and didn't show any Winforms at all. This allowed us to have more time for architecture discussions and I think it worked out well.

Ayende Rahien is in the process of learning Erlang, the open-source programming language behind Amazon SimpleDB and open-source CouchDB, a document-oriented database that’s an Apache Incubator project.

Here are his posts by topic as of 10/24/2008 11:00 AM PDT (in chronological order):

All in all, an amazing tour de force of analyzing complex source code in a language that’s new to him.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 2:43 PM

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