Latest Microsoft Blogs

Last week the data team shipped the Release Candidate of Entity Framework 4.1.  You can learn more about it and download it here . EF 4.1 includes the new “EF Code First” option that I’ve blogged about several times in the past.  EF Code First provides a really elegant and clean way to work with data, and enables you to do so without requiring a designer or XML mapping file.  Below are links to some tutorials I’ve written in the past about it: Code First Development with Entity Framework 4.x EF Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database The above tutorials were written against the CTP4 release of EF Code First (and so some APIs might be a little different) – but the concepts and scenarios...

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here . Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.  SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does...

Earlier this week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  In my blog post a few days ago I talked about a few of the improvements introduced with the new CTP5 build.  Automatic support for enforcing DataAnnotation validation attributes on models was one of the improvements I discussed.  It provides a pretty easy way to enable property-level validation logic within your model layer. You can apply validation attributes like [Required], [Range], and [RegularExpression] – all of which are built-into .NET 4 – to your model classes in order to enforce that the model properties are valid before they are persisted to a database.  You can also create your own custom validation attributes...

This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  EF Code-First enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer: Code-First Development with...

Do you like a big pile of source code? Well, there is an imperial buttload of source in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit . It's actually a 178 meg download, which is insane. Perhaps start your download now and get it in the morning when you get up. It's extremely well put together and I say Kudos to the folks that did it. They are better people than I. I like to explore it while watching TV myself and found myself looking through tonight. I checked my blog and while I thought I'd shared this with you before, Dear Reader, I hadn't. My bad, because it's pure gold . With C# and VB, natch. Here's an outline of what's inside. I've heard of folks setting up lunch-time study groups and going through...

Last month I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option.  EF “code-first” enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to: Work with data without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything In my initial blog post I introduced EF “code-first” and demonstrated how to use the default EF4 mapping conventions to create a new database.  These default conventions work very well for new applications, and enable you to avoid having...

Last week I blogged about the new Entity Framework 4 “code first” development option.  The EF “code-first” option enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data.  It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything In last week’s blog post I demonstrated how to use the default EF4 mapping conventions to enable database persistence.  These default conventions work very well for new applications, and enable you to avoid having to explicitly configure...

Remember good developers don't just write source code, they also READ it. You don't just become a great poet by writing lots of poems. Read and absorb as well. Do check out the Source Code category of my blog here , there's (as of today) 15 pages of posts on Source Code you can check out. Recently my friend Jonathan Carter (OData Dude, my name for him) was working with a partner on some really weird stuff that was happening with a LINQ to SQL query. Remember that every abstraction sometimes leaks and that the whole port of an abstraction is "raise the level" so you don't have to worry about something. Plumbing is great because it abstracts away water delivery. For all I know, there's a dude with a bucket who runs...

You can learn a lot by reading other people's source code. That's the idea behind this series, " The Weekly Source Code ." You can certainly become a better programmer by writing code but I think good writers become better by reading as much as they can. I was poking around in the WebFormsMVP project's code and noticed an interesting pattern . You've seen code to get data from a database and retrieve it as an object, like this: public Widget Find(int id) { Widget widget = null; widget = (from w in _db.Widgets where w.Id == id select w).SingleOrDefault(); return widget; } This code is synchronous, meaning basically that it'll happen on the same thread and we'll wait around until it's finished. Now, here's...

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Murach’s books. I’m preparing to record a podcast on data access and so I pickup up this book. In a word – BRILLIANT. It covers the three primary data access technologies that matter to developers using current .NET development tools. Detailed coverage of all three makes this book a no-brainer. I read it cover to cover and it has assumed a bit of high-value real-estate on my desk !!!! [ Buy it here . ]   Technorati Tags: Microsoft , ADO.NET , LINQ , Entity Framework , Book Read More...