Entity Framework – Code Only Looking Good

The release described in this post is no longer current.
Entity Framework 4.1 RTW is now available.

I’ve been hearing rumors Entity Framework (EF) is more robust now. I did a few searches and found the latest version EF CTP2. I was happy to find EF has a “code only” method for generating the database schema and a good take on configuration. If you are intrested in the code only method check out this walk through. I went through it and built my own application to get a handle on this new feature. Here were the steps I took to get up and running. You will need Visual Studio 2010, SQL, and CTP2 version of EF. 1) Install CTP2 Entity Framework Preview 2

2) Create a new class library project in your solution. This will be for your objects that will get mapped to the database. I named mine “UserSchema”. In this project you are just creating normal classes without any references to EF. Below are the two classes I used for testing. Notice they have no meta tags or any other tags that would be EF specific.


   public class Profile
    {
        public Profile() { }
        public int ID { get; set; }
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Description { get; set; }
        public string PermaUrl { get; set; }
        public DateTime Created { get; set; }
        public DateTime? LastSeen { get; set; }
    }

    public class User
    {
        public User() { }
        public int ID { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
        public string UserName { get; set; }
        public string Password {get; set;}
        public ICollection<profile> Profiles { get; set; }
    }

3) Next create a new class project in your solution for your EF models. I called mine UserManager.Model. I think it is good to make a seperate project as this is going to setup all your class context for connecting to EF. You will also need to add a project reference to the project that has your objects which you want to be mapped in the database and a reference to Microsoft.Data.Entity.CTP and System.Data.Entity.

public class UserModel : ObjectContext
    {
        public UserModel(EntityConnection connection)
            : base(connection)
        {
            DefaultContainerName = "UserModel";
        }

        public IObjectSet User
        {
            get { return base.CreateObjectSet(); }
        }

        public IObjectSet Profiles
        {
            get { return base.CreateObjectSet(); }
        }
    }

4) Create a new console application to automatically generate your database. I called mine “UserManager.GenerateDatabase”. This is the application that will use the object context to autogenerate the database. You can also do specific table configuration and other initialization. You can use a RegisterConfigurations method. The walk through above goes into more detail on that.

var builder = new ContextBuilder();
var connStr = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["UserDBConn"].ConnectionString;

var connection = new SqlConnection(connStr);

using (var ctx = builder.Create(connection))
{
    if (ctx.DatabaseExists())
        ctx.DeleteDatabase();
     ctx.CreateDatabase();

My project and auto generated tables ended up looking like this:

So after going through this quick setup I got a taste of what is to come. I’m still going to stick with ActiveRecord for my ORM but I think EF will definitly be an option in the future. Also, the code only mode will be a little more comfortable for people who have an ActiveRecord background. Entity Framework blog posts

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