Entity Framework Links #3

This is the third post in a regular series to recap interesting articles, posts and other happenings in the EF world.

In December our team announced the availability of EF6 Alpha 2. Scott Guthrie also posted about this release. The announcement post provides details of the features included in this preview. Of particular note, we were excited to include a contribution from AlirezaHaghshenas that provides significantly improved warm up time (view generation), especially for large models. We’ve also got some more performance improvements coming in the next preview of EF6. The Roadmap page on our CodePlex site provides details of all the features we are planning to include in EF6, including those that are not yet implemented.

We shipped some fixes for the EF Designer in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1.

There were a number of good posts about Code First Migrations . Doug Rathbone blogged about using Code First Migrations in team environments. This one’s a bit older, but we wanted to point out a good post by Jarod Ferguson with some good tips for using Code First Migrations. Rowan Miller blogged about customizing the code that is scaffolded by Code First Migrations.

Devart announced Spatial data type support in their EF provider for Oracle.

Diego Vega posted details about a workaround for performance with Enumerable.Contains and non-Unicode columns against EF in .NET 4.0.

Julie Lerman published an article in MSDN Magazine about shrinking EF models with DDD bounded contexts. She also blogged about an issue she has seen with machine.config files messing up Code First provider factories.

In case you missed it, the EF Team is now on Twitter and Facebook, follow us to stay updated on a daily basis.

Rowan Miller   
Program Manager    
Entity Framework Team