Part 3. Mastering Entity Framework

In part 1, you learned about Entity Framework’s fundamentals, and in part 2 you put Entity Framework to work. In part 3, you’ll learn about some advanced features that are necessary to get the best out of Entity Framework.

Mapping data between database and entities, reading data from the database, and updating data is vital to creating an application, but there’s still a lot to learn. What about stored procedures? How can you customize the generated code? How can you use the mapping metadata to write generic code? We’ll answer these questions in this part of the book.

Chapter 9 covers Entity SQL. Although LINQ to Entities is the most attractive language for querying the model, Entity SQL is still useful. There are tasks that require lots of lines of LINQ to Entities code that you can do with a single clause in Entity SQL.

Chapter 10 is about stored procedures. You’ll learn how to integrate them in Entity Framework and how to use them to read and update data.

Chapter 11 is about the DefiningQuery element and about reusing code through the use of database and user-defined functions in LINQ to Entities. You’ll see how you can dramatically simplify query code.

Chapter 12 introduces one of the hidden gems of Entity Framework: code and database generation. Code-generation templates enable you to fully customize code generation. You’ll also learn about database-generation customization and about extending the designer.

Chapter 13 describes how to read mapping information and how to take advantage of that information to write generic code. Such code can make applications much easier to write and maintain.