Chapter 1, Introducing Entity Framework, gives us an understanding of what the, Object Relational Mapping (ORM) technology brings to developers. You learn the history of Entity Framework as an example of an ORM. We study the architecture behind the Entity Framework technology.

Chapter 2, Your First Entity Framework Application, teaches us how to create our first project that uses Entity Framework. We create classes that map to database tables. We observe how our target database is created when the project is run. Finally, we save and retrieve our first data from the created database.

Chapter 3, Defining the Database Structure, dives deep into details of mappings between classes and tables. We create maps between properties to columns as well as rules that govern such mappings. We define relationships between classes that translate into relationships between tables. We exercise multiple approaches that can be used to define the mappings.

Chapter 4, Querying, Inserting, Updating, and Deleting Data, discusses how to use the LINQ API, that allows developers to retrieve the data from the database. We sort, filter, and perform element operations and use quantifiers. We query related entities. You learn the advantages and pitfalls of eager and lazy loading. We insert, delete, and update the data.

Chapter 5, Advanced Modeling and Querying Techniques, dives deeper into modeling and querying techniques. We use complex types to have more consistency in the database structures. We create an explicit table and column names. We define structures that use table and entity splitting. We use projections in queries to make them more efficient and summarize our data. We page the data for retrieval, breaking it up for presentation to the users. We use joins to create queries that use related entities.

Chapter 6, Working with Views, Stored Procedures, the Asynchronous API, and Concurrency, shows how to access with database views from Entity Framework. We query data via stored procedures using the Entity Framework API. We perform create, update, and delete operations with stored procedures. We exercise Entity Frameworks and the asynchronous API and learn the advantages and pitfalls of asynchronicity. We implement concurrency handling, learning to handle the situation when multiple users attempt to update the dame data.

Chapter 7, Database Migrations and Additional Features, shows how to enable migrations on our Entity Framework project, creating and updating the database schema without data loss. We use implicit migrations first, then create explicit migrations, customizing our migration code. We use common aspects of the migrations API, adding columns and specifying default values. We apply migrations using multiple approaches. We create migrations from an existing database. We dive briefly into useful Entity Framework features, not covered previously.

Appendix, Answers to Self-test Questions, contains answers to questions you will find throughout the book.

In order to run the sample code, you will need access to Visual Studio 2013. You can use free Community Edition. You also need an instance of SQL Server 2008 R2 or higher on your machine. The free Express edition of SQL Server can be used.

This book is intended for software developers with some prior experience in the Microsoft .NET framework who want to learn how to use Entity Framework. Maybe you have used SQL for years, but want to write data access code more easily and safely, using C# or VB.NET instead. This book is for you if you want to learn how to use this Microsoft ORM to create strongly typed data access logic, or want to get your database changes deployed with minimal effort. This book will get you up and going quickly, providing many examples for C# and VB.NET programmers that illustrate all the key concepts of Entity Framework.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, user input are shown as follows: "You also need at least one class that represents the database itself, which will inherit from DbContext."

A block of code is set as follows:

Public Class Person
 Property PersonId() As Integer
 Property FirstName() As String
 Property LastName() As String
End Class

Any command-line input or output is written as follows. "If we need to get detailed help for the PowerShell commandlet Enable-Migrations, we just need to type Get-Help Enable-Migrations."

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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