ADO.NET Entity Framework

Last week, we at Krasis Press launched what we believe is the first book fully dedicated to ADO.NET Entity Framework published worldwide, in any language: "ADO.NET Entity Framework: Data centric applications and services" (in Spanish).

And what a book! Honestly, I firmly believe we have produced an excellent resource, created by three experts that have been working with this technology since the very first betas, and using it in real life projects for many months: Unai Zorrilla, Octavio Hernandez and Eduardo Quintas.

Unai and Octavio (Microsoft MVPs) are already well known to audiences for their frequent articles in publications, and for being the authors of the books "Modeling business processes with Workflow Foundation" and "C# 3.0 and LINQ", both published by Krasis in October, 2007 (in Spanish).

The book consists of six chapters plus five appendixes, which cover in depth most of the features of the Entity Framework:

  • The book begins with a chapter introducing the technology, and continues with a second chapter fully devoted to show all the resources that Entity Framework puts in our hands for the development of conceptual entity data models, using clear and practical examples.
  • After that, the next two chapters describe in detail the possibilities that the main programmatic layers of the Entity Framework (Entity Client, Object Services and LINQ to Entities) offer us in order to query and update the conceptual models.
  • The fifth chapter, "Entity Framework in the real world" is dedicated to several more advanced topics, such as the relation between EF and WCF and its application to N-tier application development, or the techniques that are at our disposal for doing data binding against EF-produced results in WinForms, WPF and ASP.NET applications.
  • At last, the sixth chapter offers a broad introduction to ADO.NET Data Services, a practical framework built by Microsoft on top of the Entity Framework in order to expose entity data models through REST-based services.
  • The five appendixes cover, respectively, the fundamentals of LINQ, an Entity SQL reference, EDMGen.exe and DataSvcUtil.exe command line options and JSON serialization basics.

You can download the table of contents and part of the first chapter following this link. You can buy the book in the same webpage. The price includes courier delivery expenses to any part of Spain, although delivery to other countries may have extra charges.

Other books in English on the subject are expected to appear in bookstores at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009.

Read this post in Spanish / Lee este post en Español

Escrito por un humano, no por una IA