POCO Entities in ADO.NET 4.0 - One of the most anticipated features of the Entity Framework 4.0 is the ability to have POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) entities. This allows developers to produce domain objects free of any persistence baggage, with no requirements imposed inheritance-wise. Up till now entity objects were required to either inherit EntityObject or had to implement IEntityWithKey, IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships. This makes it far easier to use EF with legacy domain classes and keeps data models clean and unconcerned with their own persistence. To demonstrate this feature I'll start out with a basic SQL Server table structure and test data that maps employees to departments. Database create table Departments ( Department_ID int identity primary key clustered, Name varchar(255) not null ) create table Employees ( Employee_ID int identity primary key clustered, FirstName varchar(255)...
ADO.Net Data Services with jQuery - Lately I've been spending quite a bit of time messing around with ADO.Net Data Services. Thus far I'm pleased with it. Considering it sits nicely on top of EF models and I've been using EF for nearly all of my personal projects of late I've been able to glean a service layer with almost no work. If there's one thing I'm not passionate about, however, it's web interface work. I'm very glad technologies like jQuery exist but I'm ecstatic it's other people's jobs to work with them. But, I have no choice but to do some web work on occasion. Whether it's for simple administrative tools at the office or even the development of this very website sometimes I simply must write web interface code. With both of those concepts on...
Using Entity Framework with Oracle - I've long thought that the Entity Framework hasn't gotten a fair shake. Sure, there's some room for improvement but for an out-of-the-box ORM that ships with the framework it's not too bad. One thing has always troubled me, though. I was never sure what kind of traction it had with data sources other than SQL Server. Recently in a project circumstances conspired in such a fashion that it would be pretty darn handy to use EF to access data in Oracle. Turns out it that despite being a little rough around the edges it's very feasible. The Provider The first step is to download and install an Entity Framework provider for Oracle. There are several options out there but the Oracle Data Provider for Entity Framework on CodePlex seems to be...
Tale of a Website, from Rails to ASP.NET to Django - I hesitate to call it complete yet but for the most part www.chrisumbel.com has been ported from ASP.Net to Django. Sure, there really isn't a lot to this site so no port would have been incredibly painful but I'm quite pleased with the effort level (or lack thereof) required to get it done. Aside from just this port it's been a long and interesting ride for just a bunch of blog posts and comments. Ancient History: Rails in my basement In reality the story began with Ruby on Rails several years back. This site still bares the look, feel, basic data structure and even a few blog posts from kilnaar.com which was based on a Rails and MySQL stack and spent most of its time running on various OpenBSD, Solaris and...
