Entity Framework Links #3

  • Article

This is the third post in a regular series to recap interesting articles, posts and other happenings in the EF world.

In December our team announced the availability of EF6 Alpha 2. Scott Guthrie also posted about this release. The announcement post provides details of the features included in this preview. Of particular note, we were excited to include a contribution from AlirezaHaghshenas that provides significantly improved warm up time (view generation), especially for large models. We’ve also got some more performance improvements coming in the next preview of EF6. The Roadmap page on our CodePlex site provides details of all the features we are planning to include in EF6, including those that are not yet implemented.

We shipped some fixes for the EF Designer in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1.

There were a number of good posts about Code First Migrations . Doug Rathbone blogged about using Code First Migrations in team environments. This one’s a bit older, but we wanted to point out a good post by Jarod Ferguson with some good tips for using Code First Migrations. Rowan Miller blogged about customizing the code that is scaffolded by Code First Migrations.

Devart announced Spatial data type support in their EF provider for Oracle.

Diego Vega posted details about a workaround for performance with Enumerable.Contains and non-Unicode columns against EF in .NET 4.0.

Julie Lerman published an article in MSDN Magazine about shrinking EF models with DDD bounded contexts. She also blogged about an issue she has seen with machine.config files messing up Code First provider factories.

In case you missed it, the EF Team is now on Twitter and Facebook, follow us to stay updated on a daily basis.

Rowan Miller   
Program Manager    
Entity Framework Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2013
    I'm liking these frequent release strategies now being employed by you guys. I also like the Code-First approach, BUT when working in a team environment we need a better "automatic" way of it all just working.  Appreciate the blog showing couple of manual steps to do this, but that's the problem - they are manual steps and Developers got to remember to do it. Overall, nice work though.

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2013
    Any chance that SQL trace logging will be implemented in Entity Framework anytime soon? Even System.Net has System.Diagnostics trace logging in it. An easy way to enable logging of SQL statements seems like an oversight and long overdue.

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2013
    @Jon - We aren't planning to implement tracing in EF6 but it is definitely one of the most requested features after the ones we are working on at the moment. We don't have definite plans but I expect us to implement it in the near future.

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2013
    Awesome, thanks Rowan. It's not a huge issue, but, it's helpful for debugging. I was using Intellitrace, but, I noticed that it seemed to be truncating the SQL text in a somewhat complicated query that I had. One other minor issue that would be nice to have implemented is the ability to call int.ToString() in an EF query. Currently, you can use SqlFunctions.StringConvert(), so, it's not a big deal. That method doesn't have an overload for int either. It only has decimal. So, you have to cast the value which seems less than ideal.

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2013
    @Jon - Feel free to open an issue on our CodePlex site to support ToString for converting to a string - entityframework.codeplex.com/.../Create