Book Image

Entity Framework Tutorial (Update) - Second Edition

By : Joydip Kanjilal
Book Image

Entity Framework Tutorial (Update) - Second Edition

By: Joydip Kanjilal

Overview of this book

The ADO.NET Entity Framework from Microsoft is a new ADO.NET development framework that provides a level of abstraction for data access strategies and solves the impedance mismatch issues that exist between different data models This book explores Microsoft’s Entity Framework and explains how it can used to build enterprise level applications. It will also teach you how you can work with RESTful Services and Google’s Protocol Buffers with Entity Framework and WCF. You will explore how to use Entity Framework with ASP.NET Web API and also how to consume the data exposed by Entity Framework from client applications of varying types, i.e., ASP.NET MVC, WPF and Silverlight. You will familiarize yourself with the new features and improvements introduced in Entity Framework including enhanced POCO support, template-based code generation, tooling consolidation and connection resiliency. By the end of the book, you will be able to successfully extend the new functionalities of Entity framework into your project.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Entity Framework Tutorial Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the code-first, model-first, and database-first approaches to domain design


There are three approaches to developing data-driven applications using Entity Framework. These are:

  • Code-first: In this approach, you would create your POCO classes first and then generate the database using these POCO classes

  • Model-first: In this approach, you would create your model first using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer and then generate your database from this model

  • Database-first: In this approach, you would create your database first and then generate your model using the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer from this database

Using the code-first approach

In this approach, you would create your POCO classes first and then generate the database using these classes. Let's create a POCO class as shown:

public class Customer
    {
        public int CustomerID { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
    }

The context class should...