ScreenCast - How to Work with Dynamic Data to Entities (VS2008 SP1 Beta)
Dynamic data is a technology that lets you build really quickly a full data aware application that is
controlled form the model itself. The nice thing is that you can keep your application updated without touching your pages, and you can customize exactly how any of your fields and tables will behave through the Model layer.
One of the nice features in SP1 is that you can now build a project with Dynamic Data to ADO.NET Entity Framework (Click to Enlarge).
With this new option you can choose your data model to be the layer of Entity Framework and by that you can have the following main benefits :
- You can work with several databases and not only with MSSQL like in Linq2Sql.
- You have a lot more options to play with than with Linq2Sql, and the model is a bit more complex because of that.
- The data source can be any number of sources like replication, BI, etc (you are not constrained to database only relations).
And to sum it up, you just have a lot more control on your data layer than with any other model currently out there in VS.
The good news are that from today you can easily build a Dynamic data project that is sitting on top of that model, so not only you are able to build your model layer with a great ease and control any field mapping and properties, you can easily scaffold them out to the web the way you want to.
Watch this short video to see how to start working with Dynamic Data for entities :
Download the screencast(WMV)
You can find more information about ADO.NET Entity Framework on Guy Burstein Blog at these posts :
· EntityDataSource - Overview
· EntityDataSource - Where Clause
Enjoy,