R – ADO.NET data services or Entity framework – Which one to learn

entity-frameworkwcf-data-services

I am having a bit of a free time and i am planning to catch up on some new technology. I started of my .NET development career as a ASP.NET developer. Presently I am done with ASP.NET development,for that matter i am done with any front end development. These days i am into Business layer and DAL development with the primary focus on WCF service development and I am going to continue doing so. Given the situation which one would be helpful for me in moving forward? ADO.NET data services or Entity Framework?

Best Answer

Those are two totally separate items:

ADO.NET Entity Framework is a data-access and data-modelling technology to handle database storage, modelling objects etc. on top of that
ADO.NET Data Services is a REST-ful way of exposing such data models to a wide audience, by means of browsers and URLs

So basically, first you need to know a bit about Entity Framework, and then you should learn how to make that available to the world at large.

Marc

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.net – Entity Framework vs LINQ to SQL

LINQ to SQL only supports 1 to 1 mapping of database tables, views, sprocs and functions available in Microsoft SQL Server. It's a great API to use for quick data access construction to relatively well designed SQL Server databases. LINQ2SQL was first released with C# 3.0 and .Net Framework 3.5.

LINQ to Entities (ADO.Net Entity Framework) is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) API which allows for a broad definition of object domain models and their relationships to many different ADO.Net data providers. As such, you can mix and match a number of different database vendors, application servers or protocols to design an aggregated mash-up of objects which are constructed from a variety of tables, sources, services, etc. ADO.Net Framework was released with the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1.

This is a good introductory article on MSDN: Introducing LINQ to Relational Data

Entity-framework – How to view the SQL generated by the Entity Framework

For those using Entity Framework 6 and up, if you want to view the output SQL in Visual Studio (like I did) you have to use the new logging/interception functionality.

Adding the following line will spit out the generated SQL (along with additional execution-related details) in the Visual Studio output panel:

using (MyDatabaseEntities context = new MyDatabaseEntities())
{
    context.Database.Log = s => System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(s);
    // query the database using EF here.
}

More information about logging in EF6 in this nifty blog series: http://blog.oneunicorn.com/2013/05/08/ef6-sql-logging-part-1-simple-logging/

Note: Make sure you are running your project in DEBUG mode.

Best Answer

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.net – Entity Framework vs LINQ to SQL

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