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)...
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...
