Saturday, July 18, 2009

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 7/13/2009+

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

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

Jason Short reports VistaDB 3.6 Preview Build 87 with Entity Framework Support is available on 7/18/2009

We have not decided if we are going to leave the EF in the 3.6 edition when we release, or if it will continue to be a Preview technology.  It all depends on the feedback we get from the community. 

The Entity Framework DLL implements all the commands, but we are not sure about all the various SQL generation strategies in the EF runtime.  I am sure there are some LINQ commands that will generate terrible SQL for us, but we need to find those and get them addressed.  I wanted to get a profile and stat output for this build, but it didn’t make it in – maybe next one.  I think the EF basics should work for just about anything, it just remains to be seen how well it performs on various LINQ commands, and what we can do to improve it.

The current plan is to test EF for now as a Preview technology and ship it later this year.  Is this feature a big enough deal to bump the version to 4.0?  We would like to know your feedback.  It has been a lot of work to get all of the EF implemented and tested, but hopefully it will show people that VistaDB is quite serious about the future of database technologies.  People thought we hadn’t shipped it because we couldn’t do it for some reason.  We are just taking a very cautious approach, hopefully that is something you can appreciate from your database vendor.

Gunnar Peipman’s Entity Framework 4.0: On the way to Composite Pattern - Gunnar Peipman's ASP.NET blog post of 7/17/2009 continues his exploration of EF v2 with a Photo Album application.

Beth Massi tackles Filtering Entity Framework Collections in Master-Detail Forms in this 7/16/2009 post:

Last post I talked about how to get WPF data binding to work with master-detail entity collections. I had a couple readers ask me how they could filter the child collection instead of bringing them all down so in this post I’d like to show how you could do that. It’s actually pretty easy. …

Beth Massi’s Master-Detail Data Binding in WPF with Entity Framework post of 7/14/2009 “talk[s] about a really common scenario in data applications, creating a master-details (one-to-many) data entry form.” …

Gil Fink the slide deck and demo software from his Exploring Entity Framework and Data Services Slide Deck presentation to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) .NET
Developers Group on 7/14/2009.

LINQ to SQL

Devamigo shows you how to write a Unit testable LinqToSql repository in this 7/13/2009 post:

LinqToSql data classes are not unit test friendly. To solve this, we can wrap the LinqToSql ‘ DataContext ‘ in a repository. The repository itself can be unit tested either by mocking up the functionality or by a stub TestRepository class. IRepository interface.

Rick Strahl discovers System.Data.Linq.Binary is not XmlSerializable on 7/16/2009:

So I ran into an annoying problem today with an entity that has a timestamp. When imported LINQ to SQL will create a Binary type for this the timestamp and as it turns out this type does not serialize via XML. This means ASMX Web services fail as well as plain old XmlSerializer style serialization. You’ll get: System.Data.Linq.Binary cannot be serialized because it does not have a parameterless constructor. …

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

LinqMaster shows you How to Get a List of Files and Folders Without Directory.GetFiles Access Denied Error in this 7/18/2009 post.

Deepak Gupta reports Dryad and the DryadLINQ programming tools released – Microsoft concurrent-programming code on 7/17/2009:

At Faculty Summit 2009 conference, Microsoft announced the availability of Dryad and the DryadLINQ programming tools. (The Dryad code is in binary form and DryadLINQ in source form). DryadLINQ makes the Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions to the C# programming language available to .Net developers writing Dryad apps. Microsoft execs acknowledged that Dryad isn’t available on top of Azure (Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform), but that the plan is to make it available there.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

Julie Lerman says she’s Dreaming of RIA Services - Literally in this 7/16/2009 post about the “July update of RIA Services that has a ton more integration with Astoria and the newly released Silverlight 3, check the above link to Brad's blog for a series of posts as well as links to lots of resources.”

And blames her diminishing blog posts on an infatuation with Twitter in Twitter Ate my Blog of 7/16/2009.

Gil Fink the slide deck and demo software from his Exploring Entity Framework and Data Services Slide Deck presentation to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) .NET
Developers Group on 7/14/2009. (Repeated from the “Entity Framework” section.)

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

Steve Naughton’s Securing Dynamic Data Preview 4 Refresh – Part 3 post of 7/15/2009 “proceed[s] to complete the series by finishing off the hyperlinks so you have the option of them all showing as disabled or all being hidden.” …

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

David Ebbo’s Two ways to use T4 templates: support code vs. one-time generation post of 7/17/2009 discusses two T4 usage patterns in MVC projects:

    1. Support code: here, a T4 template generates a file that you rarely need to look at, and you should never modify.  Instead, it contains “support code” that you can code against.  A great example of this is my T4MVC template.
    2. One-time generation: here, you are executing a T4 template to generate a file that then becomes part of your project.  This file can then safely be modified.  The T4 template just gave you a starting point.  A great example of this is the Add View dialog in ASP.NET MVC.

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