PDC blogging – Data Programming and Modeling
As I've stated before, I attended the data programming and modeling session - And I enjoyed every minute. Chris Anderson and Don Box rock !
They talked about Entity Framework 4 – The automatic lazy load (no more need to call the damn Load() method), different approached of model first, POCO and code only (using the fluent API) etc.
There was a talk about code first having a configuration class instead of writing all the fluent API by hand, and without having to add attributes to your POCO classes - that is something worth checking out.
They also showed the new Transact Sql editor that was shipped with VS2010, Which allows running TSQL queries and also has intellisense:
After talking about EF we got to the real deal - ODATA (Open Data Protocol) that allows producing and consuming data through various applications, for example export Sharepoint data and consume with Excel,
If you want to expose your data using the OData protocol you can easily build a service using the ado.net data services. To describe the data returned from these services you don't use XSD schemas anymore but rather... the EDM (Entity Data Model) ! A new use for the well known EF's EDM.
Last, but not least, they showed bits from project “M” - you can take an EDMX file, rename its extension to “.M” in VS and it will automatically change to a “M” model and vice versa – I tried it in VS 2010 beta 2 but it didn’t work, maybe it part of the next version ?. This project is quite new and I didn’t had a chance to look at it yet, but there are some lectures on the project in the following days which I’ll try to attend and post about later on.