Book Image

Entity Framework Tutorial

By : Joydip Kanjilal
Book Image

Entity Framework Tutorial

By: Joydip Kanjilal

Overview of this book

<p>The ADO.NET Entity Framework is a new way to build the data access layer of your Windows or web applications. It's an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) technology that makes it easy to tie together the data in your database with the objects in your applications, by abstracting the object model of an application from its relational or logical model.<br /><br />This clear and concise book gets you started with the Entity Framework and carefully gives you the skills to speed up your application development by constructing a better data access layer. It shows you how to get the most from the ADO.NET Entity Framework to perform CRUD operations with complex data in your applications.<br /><br />This tutorial starts out with the basics of the Entity Framework, showing plenty of examples to get you started using it in your own code. You will learn how to create an Entity Data Model, and then take this further with Entity types. You will also learn about the Entity Client data provider, learn how to create statements in Entity SQL, and get to grips with ADO.NET Data Services, also known as Project Astoria.</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Entity Framework Tutorial
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Working with the ADO.NET Entity Client


The ADO.NET Entity Client is a data provider that provides a gateway for executing entity level queries using the Entity Framework. You can use it to query against your conceptual model of data. Entity Client uses its own language called Entity SQL, a storage independent language, to communicate with the conceptual model. You can execute the same Entity SQL query against any data store. In other words it is provider independent and you need not make changes to your query if the underlying data store changes. Therefore, you can use the same Entity SQL syntax to talk to the conceptual model, regardless of the data store in use.

The Entity SQL queries are converted to a command tree that is in turn passed to the storage specific provider to generate native SQL statements. As an example, if you are using SQL Server as the database, the Entity SQL queries that you are using will be converted to a command tree that will be passed to the ADO.NET provider for...