I recently had the pleasure of appearing on a Visual Studio Toolbox episode, hosted by Robert Green, with my co-worker Glenn Condron.

Back in the EF4.3 days I had been part of another 2 part series on VS Toolbox with Diego Vega. Since the previous episodes were so popular we thought we should catch up on what has happened since EF4.3.

In this new episode we cover the EF5 and EF6 releases, including a bunch of demos.

In this episode, Robert is joined by Rowan Miller and Glenn Condron of the Entity Framework team. Rowan and Glenn first provide a brief history of EF [01:30]. They next bring us up to speed on what was new in EF 5 [10:15]. Demos include DbContext code generation, enum support, spatial data types, and multiple diagrams and coloring. They explain how Entity Framework is open source and what that means [26:30] and then discuss upgrading to EF 6 [32:00]. Finally, they show us what is coming in EF 6. Demos include database command interception/logging, code-based configuration and async query and save.

Source Code

After seeing a demo it’s always nice to grab the source code and play with it yourself… so here it is. You will need to get your own Bing Maps key and enter it on line 76 of Views\Listings\Details.cshtml.

Because the original demo targeted an existing database (using Database First), I’ve added some code to Global.asax to create the database for you when the app loads up.