Chapter 12. LINQ to Entities Overview

The Entity Framework (EF) is another object-relational data access technology from Microsoft that includes a LINQ implementation. Commonly called LINQ to Entities, EF shipped in Service Pack 1 of the .NET Framework 3.5 release. It is expected to evolve significantly in the coming releases. The first release includes runtime libraries and designer support in Visual Studio for generating classes and metadata files. It supports database and model-driven styles of development.

EF emphasizes model-driven development. It has its own set of concepts and vocabulary that go beyond the CLR classes and database objects. EF can be used with LINQ or Entity SQL. Entity SQL is a query language based on SQL but designed ...

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