Course: Entity Framework 6.1 Development

In this course you’ll learn some of the basics of object relational mapping systems and how they overcome some of the problems when working with relational data in an object based application. You’ll also see how entity objects are a big improvement over generic data objects, such as the data set and the data tables provided by ADO.NET. Then you’ll learn specifically about the Entity Framework, Microsoft’s ORM technology and why it is a compelling data access technology in the .NET development space. Big spoiler, it’s not just because Microsoft has made Entity Framework their core data access strategy. You’ll see Entity Framework in action to build a simple but powerful data access application as well as some of the APIs and tools it provides.

In this course you’ll explore some of the ways that you can create data models using the tools provided with Entity Framework and SQL Server Data Tools in Visual Studio. Then we’ll reach down into the guts of the XML that makes up the three Entity Data models, conceptual, storage and mapping. So that you have a good understanding of how Entity Framework implements many of its features. The XML might be intimidating just from the sheer volume of it, even for a simple data base. Put you’ll see how it is pretty straight forward and quite understandable.

We’ll start this course by looking at LINQ to Entities, which lets you write SQL-like statements against entity objects using syntax built into C# and Visual Basic. Although you’re likely to use LINQ for every day application development with Entity Framework, you can also use Entity SQL, which is a powerful SQL-like querying language built into Entity Framework. Then, we’ll take a brief look at querying using the EntityClient API, which is a low-level option that lets you access raw data streams but requires you to materialize your own objects to receive the results. Next you’ll learn how to update existing entities, insert new entities, and delete entities, as well as get object state information.

We’ll start the course with a look at how you can customize an entity data model to make it easier for application developers to use its entity objects. The model designer in Visual Studio has plenty of options for refining a model, as well as make it easier to work with large, complex models with hundreds of entities. To finish up you’ll also learn some best practices of model design, so that you can build robust applications that take full advantage of the right Entity Framework infrastructure.

This course will start by covering how code-first works by default, which will probably work for most applications early in their development cycle. But when you’re ready to deploy the application to a production server, or need more flexibility in how Entity Framework creates a database. You’ll see how to create a code-first model and create a database from it, and see an application that makes use of it to maintain data in the database. You’ll also learn how to customize the database using both data annotations and the DBModelBuilder API, which lets you write code instead of use data annotations. Last you’ll see how code migrations is a newer feature of code first that goes beyond just deleting and recreating the database when the model changes.

In this course, you’ll learn about a few of Entity Framework’s more recent additions to support SQL Server features. You’ll start with a look at Entity Framework’s support for hierarchyID or, rather, it’s missing support. Then you’ll jump into one of the best new features in Entity Framework in a long time, that would be enums, which you can use to protect the integrity of your data. Next you’ll explore Entity Framework’s support for spatial data, which support location-aware applications and data. You’ll wrap up the course with a look at table-valued functions and their support in Entity Framework.