The challenge of bringing data from efficient storage engines such as SQL Server into object-oriented programming models is hardly a new one. Most developers address this challenge by writing complex data access code to move data between their applications and the database. However, writing such code requires an understanding of the database, so that you can access data either from the raw tables, from views, or from stored procedures.

More often than not, databases are managed by DBAs whose job it is to ensure that the database is available, powerful, efficient, and secure. The means of accomplishing this generally take the data further out of the scope of your own concepts of how your data should be structured in your applications. It requires a solid knowledge of the database schema, table definitions, and stored procedures along with their parameters and results, views, keys, and more, so that you can create your data access code.

Entity-relationship modeling, introduced in the 1970s by Peter Chen, goes a long way toward solving this problem. Using entity-relationship modeling, programmers create a conceptual model of the data and write their data access code against that model, while an additional layer provides a bridge between the entity-relationship model and the actual data store. Most modeling, to date, gets done on a whiteboard.

With the ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft has made entity-relationship modeling executable. They achieved this using a combination of XML schema files, behind the scenes code generation (creating .NET objects), and the ADO.NET Entity Framework APIs. The schema files define a conceptual layer to expose the data store’s (e.g., a SQL Server database) schema, and to create a map between that and your application-level objects. The ADO.NET Entity Framework allows you to write your programs against classes that are generated from this conceptual layer. The Framework then handles all the required translation as you extract data from the database and send it back in.

Figure 1: How the different layers of the Entity Data Model fit into your application.

This article provides an explanation of the basic concepts of ADO.NET Entity Framework, gives you an opportunity to get your hands dirty with code, and provides a glimpse into the possibilities that ADO.NET Entity Framework opens up for developers.

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