OakLeaf Systems: LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 8/12/2008

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 8/12/2008

Note: Due to the volume of VS 2008 SP1 items, this post covers only August 12, 2008 content in an abbreviated format.

Entity Framework v1

Alex James’ Structural Annotations - One Pager explains changes in store for SSDL and CSDL schema annotations to support other EF applications, such as Reporting Services. Alex asks at the conclusion, “Do you think you will find a use for Structured Annotations?”

Kris Andersson continues his Designing an airline passenger reservation system series with Application Architecture - Part 5a - Data Access Layer - A closer look at ADO.NET Entity Framework, which describes his attempt to create a Entity Data Model from an SQL Server database with 1000+ tables and 2000+ associations. After six hours he gave up. Kris promises:

The next article in this series (5b) will re-visit the performance comparison between EF and Linq to SQL that Roger Jennings performed on the beta. I am hoping that the beta version was slowed down by debug code and that the RTM version will be faster / have less overhead.

Julie Lerman analyzes the ADO.NET Team’s What's new in the VS 2008 SP1? post of 8/11/2008 in her Entity Framework changes between SP1 Beta and RTM post.

Jeff Derstadt supplies a list of Entity Framework RTM Breaking Changes classified as Provider Changes, Entity Services Changes, Mapping and Metadata Changes, EntityDataSource Changes and Tools Changes categories.

Danny Simmons has updated his Entity Framework FAQ for SP1 in EF FAQ updated. So far, I haven’t found any documentation or other information about the new data binding features.

Julie Lerman describes the strangely named EF: GetRelationTypeExpensiveWay method, announces two new sites to support her forthcoming book (LearnEntityFramework.com and ProgrammingEntityFramework.com), and discusses her most recent 14-page Article: Data Access Options in Visual Studio 2008 in the September/October 2008 issue of CoDe Magazine. (The article’s available in print but isn’t on line yet.)

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

Guy Burstein shows how easy it is to add a Service Reference to an ADO.NET Data Services back end in VS 2008 SP1: Add Reference to ADO.Net Data Service and WCF Service Contract changes in WCF Service Contract Refactoring affects Configuration File in VS2008 SP1.

Mike Flasko describes the maddening issue of the Silverlight Client Library’s incompatibility with ADO.NET Data Services SP1 in Compat Note: Silverlight Beta 2 Client & .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Server Components. If you install VS 2008 SP1, your out of luck when attempting to use a Silverlight 2 front end with Astoria SP1.

Marcelo Lopez Ruiz explains how the DataServiceContext’s IgnoreMissingProperties property immunizes Astoria projects from breaking when the server implements a new property in Ignoring server properties.

SQL Server Data Services

DRD’s Performance of Soap compared to Rest post in the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) - Getting Started forum confirms an approximate 2:1 difference in SOAP and REST upload performance that I reported in my Updated SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) Test Harness: Northwind REST and SOAP Uploads post of

Mike Amundsen has started an SSDS FriendFeed Room for “Conversations around SQL Server Data Services.” It’s public, so anyone can join.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

No articles found.

LINQ to SQL

Matt Manela provides the code for “generic methods for inserting and updating a detached entity into a database using LINQ to SQL” in Generic Insert and Update for LINQ To SQL.

Robert Cain promises a future post to show how to access SQL Server Compact 3.5 from LINQ to SQL in Getting Started with SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5. (LINQ to SQL is a far more rational choice as an O/RM for SSCE than Entity Framework.)

Update 8/13/2008: Rosor Demonstrates a Heterogeneous Join in LINQ with VB.NET: Join SQL with a CSV file or List of objects.