Foreword
I first met Julie Lerman (rhymes with “German”) while she was visiting the Microsoft campus for a Software Design Review (SDR). An SDR is an event where we invite customers we trust to be representative of a much larger crowd. In this particular case, I was new to the SQL Server division and trying hard to catch up on the raft of technologies Microsoft shipped in the data space for developers. Julie, on the other hand, was a seasoned veteran and not only knew the answers to all of my Entity Framework questions but had already written a book on the topic. That book, Programming Entity Framework, was the first edition of the book you’re now holding in your hands. Or, if you are a .NET programmer, you know it simply as “THE book on EF.”
As the months went on, I ran into Julie more and more. She was researching the second edition of her famous EF book. And by “researching,” I mean “pointing out our mistakes.” Julie was not only invaluable for teaching customers the real-world ins and outs of EF, she had a way of asking questions about alphas and betas that made us rethink what we were doing in many cases to improve the version of EF that ships with .NET 4 as well as the supporting functionality in Visual Studio 2010. And she was so well respected because of her first EF book that anything she said received extra attention from the EF team in ways I don’t see for many senior architects, let alone lowly program managers. Julie ...