10-4 Episode 14: Sentient DSLs

In this episode of 10-4, we introduce a new tooling enhancement coming with Visual Studio 2010 and the Entity Framework 4.0: model-first development. This feature allows you to create your Entity Data Model from scratch and then generate a database from
it, as opposed to reverse engineering your EDM from an existing database.
For more 10-4 episodes, be sure to visit:
https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4
Visual Studio Topic Area on Channel 9:
https://channel9.msdn.com/VisualStudio
Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC:
http://tinyurl.com/GetCTP
10-4! Over and out!
Features that need to be there:
-Change scripts as well as create scripts (looks like this is already there?)
-Sized fields like Varchar need to have some way to map back field. In fact if you could constrain the field as an EF field during any save operation that would be better. I am talking zero custom code. I set String field with Length 20 in the tooling. It throws
an exception on 21+ characters.
.NET Framework 3.0 was released before the VS23008 IDE. Some extensions were added to VS2005 for WCF and WF but you could always use notepad
It's nice to see that this concept will be improved. But i think you should have a deep look at the extended data types of Microsoft Dynamics AX. That's a great thing i currently miss in Visual Studio.
can we see how to use the API-level aspects of this framework? preferrably in a test-driven fashion? this is what I really need to see to compare this against the Rails style of development. pointing and clicking all over the UI doesn't really do it for me, I'm a keyboard-oriented person.
I really love the 10-4 videos, especially the ones that JC does. Keep up the good work!
LINQ To SQL is getting quit a few improvements in the .NET 4 timeframe. You can see a pretty comprehensive list here: http://damieng.com/blog/2009/06/01/linq-to-sql-changes-in-net-40
As far as the Entity Framework being the preferred option for data access moving forward, yes, that is the case.
Thanks for the heads up bertnz. The ORM space certainly has lots of great options.
I'll definitely be digging into the code much more moving forward. This episode was just an initial introduction to the high level changes coming. I'll make sure to provide plenty of good detail/usage examples
Sounds like what you want it to use Dynamics as your data store/platform, and then place the Entity Framework over it so that you can program against its dynamic entities. If so, the guys over at ADX Studio (http://www.adxstudio.com/) are working on something that handles this very nicely.
Hi! What happens if i want to add enumeration to my model? How's that gonna be represented in Database?