Chapter 1, Improving Entity Framework in the Real World, describes how to use code first, establish repository and unit of work patterns, and test your queries.

Chapter 2, Understanding Fluent Configuration API, goes into detail on how to manage configuration mappings between your entities and your database.

Chapter 3, Handling Validation in Entity Framework, discusses validation from the simple to the complex, and how to integrate that with an ASP.NET MVC user interface.

Chapter 4, Working with Transactions and Stored Procedures, provides best practices around using Stored Procedures in your environment while maintaining separation of concerns between the database and Entity Framework.

Chapter 5, Improving Entity Framework with Query Libraries, begins the ground work of separating your queries in a testable, composable manner.

Chapter 6, Improving Complex Queries Scenarios, opens by discussing dynamic sorting and grouping and closes with a complete Specification pattern implementation.

Chapter 7, Using Concurrent and Parallel Processing, describes the challenges faced in highly concurrent applications, and when managing multiple database contexts.

Chapter 8, Improving Entity Framework with Complex Business Scenarios, discusses some of the more difficult business requests, such as handling soft deletes, capturing audit data, and refreshing entities from the database on save.

In order to use this book you will need access to Visual Studio 2010, Express Edition or above. There are a small number of recipes that discuss load testing, which require the Ultimate Edition, but those are specifically called out in those recipes.

This book is intended for professional software developers who advocate, or are interested in, test driven development and Entity Framework. It assumes basic knowledge of a test runner, in this case MS Test, the integrated test runner of Visual Studio 2010.

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 are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

{
  [TestClass]
  public class QueryTests
  {

    [TestMethod]
    public void ShouldReturnRecordsFromTheDatabase()
    {
      //Arrange
      var init = new Initializer();
      var context = new 
        BlogContext(Settings.Default.BlogConnection);
      init.InitializeDatabase(context);
      IBlogRepository repo = new BlogRepository(context);
            

      //Act
      var items = repo.Set<Blog>().FilterByBlogName("Test");
            
      //Assert
      Assert.AreEqual(2, items.Count());
    }
  }

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

{
  public class Blog
  {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public DateTime Creationdate { get; set; }
    public string ShortDescription { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public double Rating { get; set; }
  }
}

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: "Open the Improving Collection Property Validation solution in the included source code examples."

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