Book Image

WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities

By : Mike Liu
Book Image

WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities

By: Mike Liu

Overview of this book

WCF is the Microsoft model for building services, whereas LINQ to Entities is the Microsoft ORM for accessing underlying data storage. Want to learn both? You would normally have to dig through huge reference tomes—so wouldn't you agree that a simple-to-follow practical tutorial on WCF and LINQ to Entities is the way to get ahead?This book is the quickest and easiest way to learn WCF and LINQ to Entities in Visual Studio 2010. WCF and LINQ to Entities are both powerful yet complex technologies from Microsoft—but you will be surprised at how easily this book will get you get up and running with them.Mastery of these two topics will quickly enable you to create Service-Oriented applications, and allow you to take your first steps into the world of Service Oriented Architecture without becoming overwhelmed.Through this book, you will learn what's going on behind the scenes with WCF, and dive into the basic yet most useful techniques for LINQ to Entities. You will develop three real-world multi-tiered WCF services from beginning to end, with LINQ to Entities being used in the data access layer of the services. Various clients including windows console applications, the WCF Test Client, Windows Form applications and WPF applications will be created to test these WCF services. By the end of this book, you will be 100% confident that you know WCF and LINQ to Entities, not only in theory, but with sound real-world experience.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
WCF 4.0 Multi-tier Services Development with LINQ to Entities
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Deferred (lazy) loading versus eager loading


In one of the above examples we retrieved the category name of a product using this expression:

p.Category.CategoryName == "Beverages"

Even though there is no field called categoryname in the Products table we can still get the category name of a product because there is an association between the Products and Category tables. In the Northwind.edmx design pane, click on the line that connects the Products table and the Categories table and you will see all of the properties of the association. Note that its Referential Constraint properties are Category.CategoryID -> Product.CategoryID, meaning that category ID is the key field to link these two tables.

Because of this association we can retrieve the category for each product and also retrieve products for each category.

Lazy loading by default

However, even with an association the associated data is not loaded when the query is executed. For example, suppose we use the following test method to...