Pablo Castro, Britt Johnston, Michael Pizzo: ADO.NET Entity Framework - One Year Later

Posted By: Charles | Aug 29th, 2007 @ 1:47 PM

You might recall last year's introduction of the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the Channel 9 discussion of this new managed data framework with Technical Lead Pablo Castro, Product Unit Manager Britt Johnston, and Principal Architect Michael Pizzo.

The ADO.NET team just released Beta 2 of the Entity Framework so I went to have a somewhat quick chat with Pablo, Britt and Michael to learn first hand about what they've been up to for the last year as it relates to the evolution of the Entity Framework. Well, they've come a long way from last year and the Entity Framework is almost done (it's in beta 2, after all) with LINQ support (of course...), Astoria (incredibly cool - it's basically a service layer over the Entity Framework for client programming using script or simply properly contstructed URLs).

So, what's new, exactly? What were some of the challenges in getting to Beta 2? What are the most profound changes to the Entity Framework since last year's conversation? What's the future of the Entity Framework? Are developers jazzed about the Entity Framework?

Tune in. There's some great work going on in Data World these days. Apparently, the coffee in Building 35 contains special innovation enzymes. Smiley

Tags: ADO.NET, Astoria, Entity Framework, LINQ

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littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

*wondering when we're going to see Alex James in a video about the Entity Framework*

samdruk
samdruk

We do intend to let him find his desk first, of course.

cjm55

I hope those innovation enzymes are anabolic rather than catabolic Wink

Looking forward to watching this video when I get home - my IT department really whinges when I download these MASSIVE videos during office hours...

Charles
Welcome Change

The enzyme metaphor was perhaps misleading as enzymes can often break things down. In this case, they stimulate the production of innovation.

hamper

Since you are using Norhtwind I guess the designer doesn’t support schemas in the database as the other visual studio designers and wizards in 2005 and 2008!!!
Maybe we should ban Northwind and Pubs in demos and use Adventureworks.

littleguru
allein, allein,... allein, allein!

samdruk wrote:

We do intend to let him find his desk first, of course.

Yeah! He's very smart. I enjoy chatting with him very much. I wanted to visit him in Aukland but I have no time to fly over Sad

Anyway: once he found his desk I would enjoy an interview with him.

Bydia

Where can I get the WebDataService Template that I saw in the video on Channel9?

Also, I installed everything into a clean install in a VPC with all hotfixes. I typed everything like in the demo but I got an error with the following line:
using (NorthwindEntities db = NorthwindEntities())

the second NorthwindEntities has error when compiled as:
'NorthwindModel.NorthwindEntities' is 'type' but is used like a 'variable'.

Right, that's what we want no?

Pablo [MSFT]

hamper wrote:

Since you are using Norhtwind I guess the designer doesn’t support schemas in the database as the other visual studio designers and wizards in 2005 and 2008!!!
Maybe we should ban Northwind and Pubs in demos and use Adventureworks.

We actually now fully support databases that use owning schemas to group tables (we didn't back a year ago when we did the original Channel 9 video that's referenced by this one).

You can point the EDM designer to AdventureWorks and we'll automatically generate a fully-functional EDM schema and default mapping for it. (to be very specific, we generate 1 warning from the whole process where we let you know that there is a table with a column with more numeric precision than what the CLR can represent with its "decimal" type and thus we skipped it).

We use Northwind just for demos and just because it's a small schema...it's definitely not our reference test database Smiley

Pablo [MSFT]

Bydia wrote:

Where can I get the WebDataService Template that I saw in the video on Channel9?

That template is part of Project Astoria, and we have not released a beta 2-compatible version yet (we will very soon).

Bydia wrote:
Also, I installed everything into a clean install in a VPC with all hotfixes. I typed everything like in the demo but I got an error with the following line:
using (NorthwindEntities db = NorthwindEntities())

the second NorthwindEntities has error when compiled as:
'NorthwindModel.NorthwindEntities' is 'type' but is used like a 'variable'.

Right, that's what we want no?

You are missing a "new" keyword after the "=" symbol, so the compiler is getting confused about the meaning of the statement.