Professional Visual Studio 2015

Chapter 31The ADO.NET Entity Framework

What's in This Chapter?

• Understanding the Entity Framework
• Creating an Entity Framework model
• Querying Entity Framework models

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One of the core requirements in business applications (and many other types of applications) is the ability to store and retrieve data in a database. However, that's easier said than done because the relational schema of a database does not blend well with the object hierarchies that you prefer to work with in code. To create and populate these object hierarchies required a lot of code to be written to transfer data from a data reader into a developer-friendly object model, which was then usually difficult to maintain. It was such a source of constant frustration that many developers turned to writing code generators or various other tools that automatically created the code to access a database based on its structure. However, code generators usually created a 1:1 mapping between the database structure and the object model, which was hardly ideal either, leading to a problem called “object relational impedance mismatch,” where how data was stored in the database did not necessarily have a direct relationship with how developers wanted to model the ...