I recently delivered a free webinar for DevelopMentor on n-tier application development using Entity Framework 4.0. In it I explained how to use what I call “Trackable Data Transfer Objects” to achieve the same result as “Self-Tracking Entities” but using a more lightweight tracking mechanism to achieve better interoperability, as I outlined in this blog [...]
Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category
Webinar: N-Tier Entity Framework with DTOs
Posted in Technical, tagged Entity Framework on April 21, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Unearthing Some Diamonds in the Rough
Posted in Technical on April 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »
O’Reilly has a program that provides online access to books that have yet to be published. It’s called “Rough Cuts” and allows you to read chapters as they are written but before they are cleaned up for final publication, and it provides a discounted price for online and print editions. Given the nature of technology [...]
WCF Data Services versus WCF Soap Services
Posted in Technical on April 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Someone recently asked me this question: When a company that has been using 2 tiers wants to move to n-tier, what are the considerations for choosing WCF and STEs [or Trackable DTOs] vs. WCF Data Services? This is a great question because it relates to a recent re-alignment of what used to be called “ADO.NET [...]
T4 Supplement to Add Service Reference
Posted in Technical on April 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I’m a self-admitted control-freak. And when I add a service reference to a project pointing to a WCF service that exposes metadata, I would like more control over the code-generation process. Not long ago I had a specific need to to this when creating a client-side T4 template for my Trackable DTO’s project with Entity [...]
Webinar: Real-World Entity Framework
Posted in Technical on March 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
UPDATE: The screencast video is now available to be streamed or downloaded. I just delivered a screencast for DevelopMentor on Entity Framwork Real World topics – Transactions, Concurrency, Stored Procedures. A recording of the screencast will soon be available, but you can download the slides and code here. Enjoy.
Trackable DTO’s: Taking N-Tier a Step Further with EF4
Posted in Technical on February 19, 2010 | 18 Comments »
UPDATE: I created a new version of the client-side T4 template for generating trackable DTO’s. This completely decouples the client from the service by producing POCO classes based on the service metadata, instead of on the entity data model used by the service. I have also updated the client T4 template to accept a max [...]
EF4 compared to NHibernate
Posted in Technical on January 13, 2010 | 11 Comments »
Last week while teaching my new LINQ and Entity Framework course I got a question asking me to compare EF4 with NHibernate. Not having worked extensively with NHibernate, I wasn’t in a position to address the question. Then yesterday I received an email containing a link to a blog post by Oren Eini (aka Ayende [...]
100 EF4 Links
Posted in Technical on January 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
As part of my DevelopMentor Entity Framework course, I put together a delicious web site containing over 100 links to Entity Framework 4.0 topics. http://delicious.com/tonysneed_elinq Enjoy.
ELINQ with EF 4.0 Course Update
Posted in Technical on December 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been working feverishly the last couple of months to update my DevelopMentor course: Essential LINQ with Entity Framework 4.0. Here is a breakdown of the course content: Day 1: 1. Functional Programming in C# 2. LINQ to Objects 3. LINQ to XML Day 2: 4. LINQ to SQL 5. EF: Architecture 6. EF: LINQ [...]
Faking Enums in Entity Framework 4.0
Posted in Technical on December 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I ran across a great post from Alex James on how to fake enums in EF4. I’ve had a great deal of experience using enums with LINQ to SQL (via Plinqo), and it’s nice to know how to do it in EF, while waiting for the feature to come out-of-the-box in a future version. http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/archive/2009/06/05/tip-23-how-to-fake-enums-in-ef-4.aspx [...]
