3. Using the Designer

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.