Entity Framework Tutorials for ASP.NET Developers

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We have been working on new tutorials intended to introduce ASP.NET developers to the Entity Framework. The first series,  Getting Started with the Entity Framework and ASP.NET, has been published on the ASP.NET site. The tutorials build a sample application for which you can download the Visual Studio project.

Here is an outline of topics covered in this series:

  • Creating a data model from a database
  • Using the EntityDataSource control
    • Displaying and updating data
    • Sorting, filtering, and grouping
    • Displaying and updating related data (many-to-many as well as one-to-many or one-to-zero-or-one relationships)
  • Implementing table-per-hierarchy (TPH) inheritance
  • Using stored procedures

We’re currently working on a Continuing with the Entity Framework and ASP.NET series. In that series we plan to cover:

  • Using the ObjectDataSource with the Entity Framework
    • Displaying and updating data
    • Implementing the repository pattern
    • Sorting and filtering
  • Handling concurrency conflicts
  • Maximizing performance
  • What’s new in the Entity Framework version 4

Both of these series build on a Web Forms example, although topics such as setting up inheritance, using stored procedures, handling concurrency, and maximizing performance apply equally to MVC. To show more directly how to use the Entity Framework in an MVC application, another series is planned that would build an MVC application similar to the Web Forms application. The MVC series would also provide examples of how to use features that are more likely to be of interest to MVC developers, such as POCOs and code-only.

We are looking for feedback on the published tutorial and on these plans for future tutorials. Are there topics that you do not see in the tutorial or in the plans for the future that you would like to see?  Do you have suggestions for improving the published tutorial? The tutorials themselves provide a link to the Entity Framework forums for providing feedback, but if you are finding out about them from this blog post, please post your comments here and we will respond to them.

  -- Tom Dykstra
ASP.NET User Education
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