Entity Framework 4 Session DEV305 at TechEd Europe 2009 – what to expect

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Next Monday (9th Nov 2009) at 9am I will be delivering an overview of the new stuff in Entity Framework 4 at TechEd Europe.  The session is DEV305 and the description reads:

ADO.NET Entity Framework in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (catchy?)
This presentation offers an in-depth discussion demonstrating the new capabilities of the Entity Framework that will ship with Visual Studio 2010. The second release of the Entity Framework focuses on addressing two primary customer scenarios: Domain-Centric application development (TDD/DDD) and the traditional Data-Centric Web application "Forms over Data". This is an in-depth feature overview covering: N-Tier, T4 Templates, POCO, FKs, Mapping, Metadata, etc

Like many of these things, the description was written some time back and this time around I didn’t even write it :-)  I am doing broadly the above but the session would be better describe as a “Lap around the new stuff” with some mention of TDD/DDD.

If you are thinking of popping along, carry on reading:

Pre-requisites:

  • I do assume you have already looked at Entity Framework (EF) v1 or some other ORM
    • If you haven’t looked at ORMs at all you should still learn some stuff and I do plan to start with a 5 min “intro to ORM and EF”
  • I assume you haven’t yet looked at EF 4 (at least not in any depth)
  • The session uses C# throughout – but the code is simple stuff in the main.

What it covers:

  • Very brief into to ORM and EF
  • What was wrong/missing/annoying/damned ugly with EF v1
  • The main new bits of EF v4, specifically…
  • Better Tools and Design Experience
    • Model First, Template code gen, Complex Types…
  • More powerful/flexible runtime
    • Deferred Loading, Entity Functions, SQL improvements…
  • Drill into
    • Persistence Ignorance/POCO
      • Roll you own, using the templates
    • N-Tier
      • Using the templates for self-tracking entities
    • Code Only
      • No model development
  • Brief mention of where we still have work to do (IMHO)

How it does it:

  • Lots of (hopefully) easy to understand stand-alone demos on each technology area
  • Lots of console apps!

What is doesn’t show:

  • Using EF4 with other technologies such as WPF4, ASP.NET
  • Dig into TDD/BDD other than to recognise it is now much easier to do with EF v4

Should be a good session.