OakLeaf Systems: LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 4/13/2009+

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 4/13/2009+

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

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

Özgür Aytekin’s Practical Entity Framework for C#: Compiled Queries in Entity Framework of 4/14/2009 includes this suggestion:

With any new technology, performance implications are important to consider. If you want to get the best performance from Entity Framework queries, you should use the Compile function of the CompiledQuery class. In this video, Todd Miranda demonstrates how to use compiled queries in the Entity Framework: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/dd565858.aspx

Alex James’ Tip 12 - Choosing an Inheritance Strategy post of 4/14/2009 describes EF’s support for Table Per Hierarchy (TPH), Table Per Type (TPT), and Table Per Concrete Class (TPC) inheritance models. Alex notes that the EDM Designer doesn’t support TPC, but he supplies suggestions for choosing between TPH and TPT.

Mariuz reports in his Entity Framework and Firebird Embedded post of 4/13/2009 that Firebird Embedded works with Entity framework.

Sankarsan’s four-part A Layered ASP.NET MVC Application uses EF as the data access layer:

LINQ to SQL

Damien Guard’s LINQ to SQL tips and tricks #2 of 4/13/2009 provides a “few more useful and lesser-known techniques for using LINQ to SQL:”

Take full control of the TSQL
Complex stored procedures
Cloning an entity

Denny Tuppeny rehashes the Eager-Fetching of Relationships with LINQ to SQL topic in this 4/13/2009 post.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

Stephan Cruysberghs writes in his New connection providers in LINQPad post of 4/14/2009:

A few weeks ago I started testing the beta version of LINQPad 1.35. Some days ago it has been officially released. This great tool from Joe Albahari was introduced in 2007 and nowadays it has become a very mature tool which should be in the toolbox of every .NET developer.

Version 1.35 offers new connection providers and it has native support for LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework models. It also provides new query types like SQL and Entity-SQL.

I am a fan of this tool and I already demonstrated its features in many of my articles. I was probably one of the first developers who used LINQPad to execute LINQ to Entities queries. In the past you needed to add some references and create the ObjectContext in each script. It was a bit of work but it functioned fine. Now you can do the same thing with the new connection providers but they also offer many advantages. In a small article which can found on my website I will highlight some of the new features.