EF 4.2 Release Candidate Available

 


The information in this post is out of date.

Visit msdn.com/data/ef for the latest information on current and past releases of EF.


 

We recently posted about our plans to rationalize how we name, distribute and talk about releases. We heard a resounding ‘Yes’ from you so then we posted about our plans for releasing EF 4.2. We then shipped EF 4.2 Beta 1.

Third party EF provider writers tried out EF 4.2 Beta 1 and identified a couple more areas that were causing issues for them. We have been working to improve these areas and today we are making EF 4.2 Release Candidate available. The final release of EF 4.2 will be available in the near future.

 

EF 4.2 = Bug Fixes + Semantic Versioning

When we released ‘EF 4.1 Update 1’ we introduced a bug that affects third party EF providers using a generic class for their provider factory implementation, things such as WrappingProviderFactory<TProvider>. We missed this during our testing and it was reported by some of our provider writers after we had shipped. If you hit this bug you will get a FileLoadException stating “The given assembly name or codebase was invalid”. This bug is blocking some third party providers from working with ‘EF 4.1 Update 1’ and the only workaround for folks using an affected provider is to ask them to remain on EF 4.1. Third party provider writers then identified some areas in EF where it was hard to get EF to work with their providers, so we decided to address these issues in the EF 4.2 release. These provider related changes will be the only changes between ‘EF 4.1 Update 1’ and ‘EF 4.2’.

Obviously a single bug fix wouldn’t normally warrant bumping the minor version, but we also wanted to take the opportunity to get onto the semantic versioning path rather than calling the release ‘EF 4.1 Update 2’.

 

Getting Started

The following walkthroughs are available for EF 4.2:

 

Getting EF 4.2 Release Candidate

EF 4.2 Release Candidate is available via NuGet as the EntityFramework.Preview package. If you already have the EntityFramework package installed then updating to the latest version will give you EF 4.2.

EntityFramework.Preview

 

Model First & Database First Templates

The templates for using the DbContext API with Model First and Database First are now available under the “Online Templates” tab when “Right-Click –> Add Code Generation Item…” is selected on the EF Designer.

AddDbContextTemplate

 

Support

This is a preview of features that will be available in future releases and is designed to allow you to provide feedback on the design of these features. It is not intended or licensed for use in production. If you need assistance we have an Entity Framework Pre-Release Forum.

 

What’s Not in This Release?

As covered earlier this release is just a small update to the DbContext & Code First runtime. The features that were included in EF June 2011 CTP require changes to the Core Entity Framework Libraries that are part of the .NET Framework and will ship at a later date. Note that Code First Migrations is not compatible with the EntityFramework.Preview package.  Please continue to use the most recent EntityFramework package when working with Migrations.  Our Code First Migrations work is continuing and we are working to get the next release in your hands soon.

 

ADO.NET Entity Framework Team

Entity Framework 4.2 RC - EULA.rtf