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Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - ADO.NET Entity Framework

By Doug Holland (Intel) (248 posts) on May 21, 2008 at 1:56 pm

Microsoft this month released the SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 although after installing this beta some days ago I have to agree with others in the blogosphere that this service pack in many ways represents a new version of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework. While attending the last few Microsoft's TechEd conferences attendees observed the improvements to ADO.NET within the Entity Framework which will be released with the service pack and is available within this beta release.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is designed to provide developers with the ability to write their code against a conceptual entity data model within which there are mappings to the underlying normalized database schema. Often architects use these conceptual models to capture the relationships between entities during the requirements gathering phases of a project. In the past however, these models have typically been discarded as the project progresses and the delta between the conceptual models and the architectural models becomes too extreme. Once the conceptual model was created, architects would then create a logical model within which the entities and their relationships are normalized into relational database tables constrained by foreign key constraints. It would then be this logical model that the application code would be written against using SQL queries and stored procedures.

With the addition of the ADO.NET Entity Framework to the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, architects and developers now have the ability to model future systems using the conceptual entity data model and to then generate code from this model which provides the abstraction layer to the logical model (e.g. the relational database). If an existing database schema is already in place this conceptual model and the associated abstraction layer code can be generated as in this example using the CodePlex.Diagnostics database.

Given the above conceptual model, developers can now write code against this model using the generated classes shown in the following Visual Studio 2008 class diagram.

In addition to the Entity Framework that is described at a very high level here, there are many other features that have been added to the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, many of them are described by Brad Abrams here. If you'd like to learn more about the Entity Framework then Programming the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework by David Sceppa will be available later this year.

I'll be providing more insight into the SP1 beta over the coming days and weeks along with an introduction to Visual Studio Team System codename Rosario.

Categories: Software Engineering

Comments (2)

August 24, 2008 12:24 AM PDT manoj

how grat your suggestion. i think y r best for vb6

August 24, 2008 11:48 PM PDT zavier

ive got a question? how does open source cater for what microsoft ADO.NET provides

Trackbacks (1)

• Intel® Software Network Blogs » T minus 6 days and counting to Microsoft TechEd 2008
  May 28, 2008 1:26 PM PDT

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