LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 11/10/2008+

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

• Updated 11/12/2008 4:30 PM PST: Additions, added link to “Cloud Control” article.

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

• Shawn Wildermuth’s Updated My Silverlight 2/Astoria MSDN Article post of 11/12/2008 explains:

I just found out that my changes to the article and code for Silverlight 2 RTW are now live. The article makes the small change that it no longer requires you to use EdmGem to build your proxy (using the Service Reference instead).  I've also updated the code example to be compatible with .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 2. 

Here’s the updated Create Data-Centric Web Applications With Silverlight 2 article.

• Kim Major explains how Renaissance Computer Systems, Ltd. (Hashmonaim, Israel) uses a repository interface to the Entity Framework in his Data Access With The Entity Framework post of 11/12/2008. Kim mentions an issue with literals in Include() methods:

What did bother me tremendously though, was the fact that you have to specify the related entities using string literals.

For example: context.Customer.Include("SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderDetail");
This was pretty much a showstopper for me, so we introduced the IncludeBuilder. The IncludeBuilder allows you to retrieve related entities as well, but strongly typed. More on that later.

I’ll be interested to hear “[m]ore on that later.”

• Julie Lerman’s Entity Framework and Read Stored Procedures - a new perspective analyzes Gert Drapers’ suggestion to execute LINQ queries against views instead of executing stored procedures against tables in cases where the DBA doesn’t want to enable SELECT query access to tables. As Julie says:

Gert made what now seems like a totally obvious point and may also be obvious to others.

• Peter Vogel’s “Practical ASP.NET” 11/10/2008 column, Using the Entity Model to Create an ASP.NET Page, for the November issue of Visual Studio Magazine, builds on his earlier Integrating Entity Framework with an ASP.NET Web Site and Extending an Entity Framework Model -- and Some Limitations columns for using EF as the data source for ASP.NET Dynamic Data projects.

Kristofer Andersson offers in his Offtopic: Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools charity donation post of 11/12/2008 a limited number of DBML/EDMX Tools licenses at the reduced price of US$59.95 which he will donate to the Banoknoiwittaya School, “a poor school in the Chiang Rai mountains in northern Thailand.”

Simon Segal’s Julie Lerman Entity Framework Tutorials consolidated post of 11/10/2008 contains links to a PDF file that contains the content of the following tutorials:

• Creating an ADO.NET Entity Framework Entity Data Model
• Use an Entity Framework Entity as a WinForms Data Source
• Using Stored Procedures for Insert, Update & Delete in an Entity Data Model
• ASP.NET DataBinding with LINQ to Entities
• WPF Databinding with Entity Framework
• Many to Many Relationships in the Entity Data Model

LINQ to SQL

Mike Ormond’s ASP.NET Dynamic Data Demo post of 11/11/2008 offers the source code for that ASP.NET Dynamic Data website he usually builds when presenting a Dynamic Data demo session. The demo uses LINQ to SQL as it’s data source.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

Fabrice Marguerie’s Using the Select LINQ query operator with indexes of 11/10/2008 demonstrates the use of indexes with LINQ queries. However, LINQ’s performance didn’t meet that of a simple iteration for the sample data.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

• William Stacey offers an interesting collection of new feature requests for Astoria v2 in his Feature requests thread of 11/12/2008 in the ADO.NET Data Services (Pre-Release) forum.

Andy Conrad’s Slides for my ASP.NET Connections Sessions post of 11/22/2008 include a link to the slides for his DevConnections sessions:

• MDA01: Deep Dive: ADO.NET Data Services Framework—Application Patterns
• MDA04: LINQ to XML, SQL, Entities, DataSets and Co.: Data Access Technologies Explained - AKA LINQ to Anything

Andy promises that sample code will be available shortly.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

• Peter Vogel’s “Practical ASP.NET” 11/10/2008 column, Using the Entity Model to Create an ASP.NET Page, for the November issue of Visual Studio Magazine, builds on his earlier Integrating Entity Framework with an ASP.NET Web Site and Extending an Entity Framework Model -- and Some Limitations columns for using EF as the data source for ASP.NET Dynamic Data projects. (Copied from the “EF/EDM” section.)

Mike Ormond’s ASP.NET Dynamic Data Demo post of 11/11/2008 offers the source code for that ASP.NET Dynamic Data website he usually builds when presenting a Dynamic Data demo session. The demo uses LINQ to SQL as it’s data source. (Copied from the “LINQ to SQL” topic”)

SQL Data Services (SDS) and Cloud Computing

• Steve Marx’s Paging Over Data in Windows Azure Tables post of 11/12/2008 shows you how to take advantage of Table Services’ continuation tokens to page entities. You can download sample code from MSDN’s Code Gallery. (I had just started a modification to my SampleWebCloudService project to support paging of the CustomerTable.)

• Ryan Dunn has modified his SSDS REST Library to run in partial trust so that it can be used in Azure projects, as reported in his Refreshed REST library for SQL Data Services post of 11/11/2008. He promises to add support for JOIN, OrderBy, and TOP operations (if he can find the time.)

• Steve Marx shows you how to generate RowKey string values from Int32 and Int64 values in his Using Numbers as Keys in Windows Azure post of 11/11/2008.

• Steve Marx’s One-to-Many Relationships in Windows Azure Tables of 11/6/2008 explains how he enabled a one:many relationship between blog post and comment entities for his Azure-hosted ASP.NET MVC blog that he demonstrated in the Developing and Deploying Your First Windows Azure Service PDC 2008 session and described in his Windows Azure Blog Source Code from PDC post of 11/4/2008.

Steve is an evangelist on the Windows Azure team. I discovered his blog by accident on 11/12/2008. You can subscribe to his blog at this link. Here are links to feeds from fellow Azure team members David Aiken and Sriram Krishnan.

• Roger Jennings updated his Setting Up the Windows Azure Services Platform (WASP): An Illustrated Walkthrough post on 11/11/2008 to include a setting up a Hosted Service sessions. The previous version covered only setting up a Storage Account.

Jim Nakashima’s ASP.Net MVC on Windows Azure with Providers of 11/10/2008 supplements his earlier ASP.Net MVC on Windows Azure article with the addition of sample Windows Azure ASP.Net providers and a workaround for timeouts when running under on the Azure Fabric.

Paul Miller brings a Semantic Web proponent’s view to an expansion of his ‘Welcome to the Data Cloud?’ article of 10/6/2008 for ZDNet in his exhaustive Cloud Computing is so much more than a computer in the Cloud post of 11/10/2008.

John M. Will has started a series of informal Cloud Talk podcasts with Cloud Talk - Introduction to the Cloud for the Enterprise of 11/9/2008. John has more than 28 years of ESM/IT experience, primarily with IBM systems, which adds to his unique perspective on the topic.

Victoria Barret and Quentin Hardy analyze Azure’s prospects in their “Cloud Control” article for Forbes Magazine’s 11/17/2008 issue. Subtitled “Microsoft wants more of the software market and is gearing up to outflank Amazon and Google,” the article quotes Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty as saying:

15% of all future computing resources in the corporate data centers will be just for developers working in Azure. "When you look at G, what they're doing is really just search and mail. That's two of a myriad of things going on here," she says. "We put more servers in, every month, than Facebook has."

SQL Server Compact (SSCE) 3.5 and Sync Services

• Maurice de Beijer’s Updated SQL Server Compact Workflow Persistence Service post of 11/12/2008 brings his SqlCeWorkflowPersistenceService closer to conformance with the System.Workflow.Runtime.Hosting.SqlWorkflowPersistenceService class. Maurice’s class is available for download from MSDN’s Code Gallery.

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

Rob Bagby’s latest addition to his REST in WCF Blog Series is REST in WCF - Part XI (Tunneling PUT through POST) of 11/10/2008. Here are links to the 10 earlier chapters:

• REST in WCF - Part I (REST Overview)
• REST in WCF - Part II (AJAX Friendly Services, Creating The Service)
• REST in WCF - Part III (AJAX Friendly Services, Consuming The Service)
• REST in WCF - Part IV (HI-REST - Exposing a service via GET - Configuring the service)
• REST in WCF - Part V (HI-REST - Exposing a service via GET - The ServiceContract and Implementation)
• REST in WCF - Part VI (HI-REST - Consuming our GET service via AJAX)
• REST in WCF - Part VII (HI-REST - Implementing Insert and Update
• REST in WCF - Part VIII (HI-REST - Implementing Delete)
• REST in WCF - Part IX - Controlling the URI
• REST in WCF - Part X - Supporting Caching and Conditional GET

His index also includes links to related screencasts.

Scott Guthrie announced on 11/11/2008 at DevConnections that Chart Controls released in .Net Framework 3.5 for ASP.NET. According to the press release:

The ASP.NET Chart Control is a free, full-featured chart control package which enables developers to easily add rich data visualization to ASP.NET and Windows Forms applications. 

Acquired from Dundas Software, the industry leader in .NET charting solutions, the ASP.NET Chart Control is a highly comprehensive, powerful, and easy-to-use solution for adding simple to advanced interactive charts and graphs to applications with minimal coding.

John Papa offers a free PDC of Chapter 8, “Consuming Amazon’s RESTful Services with Silverlight 2,” of his Data Driven Services with Silverlight 2 title for O’Reilly in his teaser chapter is now available post of 11/9/2008.

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