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How to Use the Entity Framework Designer

In this chapter, Rebecca M. Riordan explores some of the nooks & crannies of the Entity Framework by taking a closer look at the Entity Framework Designer and some of the advanced capabilities it offers.
This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Congratulations. You’ve now written a real Entity Framework application. A pretty simple one, I grant you, and you’re unlikely to build many applications that only need a couple of loops and some Console.Writeline() statements by way of UI, but the skills you’ve already gained will get you through a surprising number of situations, particularly when you have a preexisting database that’s in reasonably good shape.

But of course that isn’t always going to be true, and there’s a lot more to learn about working with Entity Framework. (Otherwise this would be a very short book!) You might, for example, decide to start your application with the EDM and build the database from it (Model-First), or you might decide to forego a model entirely and do everything in code (Code First). We’ll look at both of these options in later chapters. Even when you are starting from a database, you may need to make more substantial changes than the simple ones we looked at in the last chapter.

In this chapter, we’ll start exploring some of the nooks & crannies of the Entity Framework by taking a closer look at the Entity Framework Designer and some of the advanced capabilities it offers.

Fitting It In

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Here’s how this chapter fits in to the book as a whole...

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