Preface
In June 2006, I was invited to attend a meet-up for data geeks at Tech Ed North America. As the meet-up was early enough not to compete with the many fun evening parties at Tech Ed, I happily crossed the lovely bridge between the Convention Center and the hotel where the meeting was to take place.
Little did I know I was about to see a new technology from Microsoft’s Data Programmability team that was going to be the focus of my attention for the next few years. In addition to other geeky discussions about data access, Pablo Castro, Mike Pizzo, and Britt Johnson (all from Microsoft) talked to us about a new technology that was coming in the next version of ADO.NET. It would allow developers to create their own views of their database and query against these views rather than against the database.
As usual, Tech Ed was overwhelming, so as interesting as this new way of working with data looked to me, I had to put it in a back corner of my mind and let it simmer for a few months. I finally downloaded the preview and began playing with it. What was most fun to me when I started exploring this technology, called Entity Framework, was the lack of serious documentation, which forced me to play with all of its knobs and dials to figure out what was in there and how it worked.
Note
Unlike many in-development technologies from Microsoft, the Entity Framework did not start off with a cool name as did WCF (née Indigo) and ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria). Although it is often hard to give ...