Book Image

Code-First Development with Entity Framework

By : Sergey Barskiy
Book Image

Code-First Development with Entity Framework

By: Sergey Barskiy

Overview of this book

<p>Entity Framework Code-First enables developers to read and write data in a relational database system using C# or VB.NET. It is Microsoft's answer to demand for an ORM from .NET developers.</p> <p>This book will help you acquire the necessary skills to program your applications using Entity Framework. You will start with database configuration and learn how to write classes that define the database structure. You will see how LINQ can be used with Entity Framework to give you access to stored data. You will then learn how to use Entity Framework to persist information in a Relational Database Management System. You will also see how you can benefit from writing ORM-based .NET code. Finally, you will learn how Entity Framework can help you to solve database deployment problems using migrations.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Code-First Development with Entity Framework
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Defining the Database Structure

In this chapter, you will learn how to specify the details of our database structure by using the Entity Framework API. We will build on what you have learned in Chapter 2, Your First Entity Framework Application, and write entity classes that define types of columns in destination tables. We will discover how to specify a relationship between tables in your database, through properties in entity classes and the configuration API. We will look at various ways to configure table structures. We will also see how .NET types map to SQL Server column types.

In this chapter, we will cover how to:

  • Create classes that define a table structure using the simple and primitive types

  • Handle nullable and required properties

  • Define attributes and configuration classes, as well as use the model builder API to specify column types

  • Specify One-to-One, One-to-Many, and Many-to-Many relationships between classes