Entity Framework 4.0 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Preface

Anyone who has been developing on the Microsoft platform for the last several years knows the drill: every few years, there's a new database access technology. There was ODBC; then DAO and RDO; OLEDB, ADO, and ADO.NET; LINQ to SQL; and now Entity Framework! In many ways, this progression of technologies has been confusing, but in other ways it's wonderfully refreshing to see this field evolve from simple open connectivity to componentized connectivity, to disconnected access in a managed environment, to friction-less access syntax, and finally to conceptual modeling.

It's the conceptual modeling that is the defining feature of Entity Framework and is at the heart of this book. Entity Framework builds upon the previous data access paradigms ...