Programming Entity Framework: Building Data Centric Apps with the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Programming Entity Framework: Building Data Centric Apps with the ADO.NET Entity Framework
Authors
Julia Lerman
ISBN
0596807260
Published
15 Apr 2010
Purchase online
amazon.com

Programming Entity Framework is a thorough introduction to Microsoft's new core framework for modeling and interacting with data in .NET applications. This highly-acclaimed book not only gives experienced developers a hands-on tour of the Entity Framework and explains its use in a variety of applications, it also provides a deep understanding of its architecture and APIs.

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Programming Entity Framework is a thorough introduction to Microsoft's new core framework for modeling and interacting with data in .NET applications. This highly-acclaimed book not only gives experienced developers a hands-on tour of the Entity Framework and explains its use in a variety of applications, it also provides a deep understanding of its architecture and APIs. Although this book is based on the first version of Entity Framework, it will continue to be extremely valuable as you shift to the Entity Framework version in .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. From the Entity Data Model (EDM) and Object Services to EntityClient and the Metadata Workspace, this book covers it all.

Working with Object Services

(Excerpt from Chapter 9)

Most of the work that you will do in the Entity Framework will involve the objects that are based on the entities in your Entity Data Model (EDM). The Object Services API is the part of the framework that creates and manages these objects. Although you have worked with Object Services in much of the code you wrote in earlier chapters, and you have touched on a variety of its topics along the way, you haven't yet seen the big picture. The API has a lot of tools that you can access directly to take charge of your entity objects.
This chapter is devoted to giving you a better understanding of the Object Services API: what it is responsible for, what it does under the covers, and some of the ways that you can take advantage of it.
You will learn about how queries are processed and turned into objects, how these objects are managed during their life cycle, and how Object Services is responsible for the way entities are related to each other. You will see how the ObjectQuery works and how it relates to LINQ to Entities queries under the covers. This chapter will also give you a better understanding of how Object Services manages an entity's state, beyond what you learned in Chapter 5.
As you become more familiar with the purpose, features, and implementation of Object Services, you will be better prepared to solve some of the challenges you will face as you move from using the "drag-and-drop" application-building features that Visual Studio provides to building enterprise applications where you need to have much more control over how all of the pieces of the application interact with one another.

Where Does Object Services Fit into the Framework?


Object Services is at the top of the food chain in the Entity Framework. The namespace for this API is System.Data.Objects, and it provides all of the necessary functionality for generating and interacting with the objects that are shaped by the conceptual layer and are populated from a data store.
As shown in the figure, Object Services initially processes your LINQ to Entities and ObjectQuery queries, as well as materializes the query results into objects.

Object Services as it relates to the rest of the Entity Framework stack
You can divide the core functionality of Object Services into seven areas:
1) Query processing
2) Object materialization
3) Object management
4) Object relationship management
5) Object state management
6) Database Manipulation Language (DML) command processing
7) Additional features

Programming Entity Framework is a thorough introduction to Microsoft's core framework for modeling and interacting with data in .NET applications. The second edition of this highly-acclaimed book not only gives experienced developers a hands-on tour of the ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) and explains its use in a variety of applications, it also provides a deep understanding of its architecture and APIs--knowledge that will be extremely valuable as you shift to the Entity Framework version in .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. From the Entity Data Model (EDM) and Object Services to EntityClient and the Metadata Workspace, Programming Entity Framework covers it all.

Written by Julia Lerman, the leading independent authority on the framework, Programming Entity Framework includes scores of reusable examples--written in both Visual Basic and C#--that you can implement right away.

This book will help you :

  • Understand the core concepts you need to make the best use of the Entity Framework (EF) in your applications
  • Learn to query your data, using either LINQ to Entities or Entity SQL
  • Create Windows Forms, WPF, and ASP.NET applications
  • Build ASMX web services and WCF services
  • Use Object Services to work directly with your entity objects
  • Delve into model customization, relationship management, change tracking, data concurrency, and more

Presented in a clear narrative style that reflects the hundreds of hours the author has spent consulting, teaching, and writing about this new data access technology and testing its myriad features, Programming Entity Framework will help you master the technology and put it to work.

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