What you’ll learn

You and I both know that you won’t be an expert with Entity Framework after reading one book, no matter how good it might be. You won’t be an expert after reading two books, or three, or a dozen. Of course, you should read what the experts have to say. But the only way to build real expertise is to write a bunch of applications, make a bunch of mistakes, and fix them. It takes time and experience, and I can’t give you that. But I can get you started.

After you finish this book you will

• Be able to use Entity Framework to build a model of your data that works the way OOP programmers think about data, not the way relational database designers do.

• Understand the structure of Entity Framework and how its components work together to handle most of the low-level database manipulation for you.

• Know how to use each of the Entity Framework workflows to start your application design at whatever point makes sense for your project.

• Know the basics of the T4 template language that allows you to control how the Entity Framework designer creates text files (including compilable code) that represent your model.

• Know how to create, retrieve, update and delete data in the database without ever writing a database command.

• Be able to perform all of the core relational operations to retrieve data using LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL.

But you won’t

• Be an expert with LINQ. It’s a huge topic, and there are some very good books that will help you gain that expertise. This isn’t one of them. (But you will know how to write the most common types of queries.)

• Learn all the ins and outs of Entity Framework. I can’t say it often enough. This book won’t make you an expert. But it will give you the foundation you’ll need to become one on your own and to tackle the advanced books that will help you get there.