Preface

Yatta, we did it! We wrote a book about Entity Framework! It’s not our first book, but it’s the first one written in English and distributed worldwide. It was a great challenge, but having the opportunity to spread the word about Entity Framework made it worth the effort. Entity Framework is a great tool that speeds up the development of data access code and that can save you days and days of coding. We know coding is our job, but wouldn’t you prefer to be more productive while writing less and better code?

Entity Framework is a great O/RM tool that’s integrated into the .NET Framework, meaning not only is it free, it’s also maintained and improved in each .NET Framework release. The result is that it’s a great platform today, and tomorrow it will be an outstanding one that will likely rule over all other O/RM platforms.

When we started planning this book, we had a clear idea in mind: we didn’t want to create a reference book; we wanted to create a practical one. We wanted you to read about real-world problems and learn real-world solutions. That’s why we developed an example and improved on it throughout the book, avoiding common pitfalls and solving problems that you’d face on the job.

This is a book that we felt was missing among those that are available. You won’t find a detailed description of all classes and properties here, but you’ll learn the best way to use them and how to combine features to get the most out of Entity Framework. We’d love to hear what you think about the book—you can reach us online at the various addresses listed in the “About this book” section on page xxiv.

It took a long time to write this book, but now that it’s in your hands we can stop spending endless nights in front of our monitors and finally sit down and spend more time with our families.

Now it’s your turn. Enjoy the read, get your hands dirty, and have fun.