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The first release of the Entity Framework (called EF 3.5 SP1) is part of Visual Studio 2008 sp1 and the .Net Framework 3.5 sp1. The second release of the Entity Framework (called EF4) is part of Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 4.
See the following resources:
The first way to look at this is to ask, why use an Object/Relational Mapper (O/RM) at all. For that I suggest looking at Glenn Block's post Ten Advantages of an ORM. Next, you might ask, why use the EF in particular. One opinion about that question appears in the post Why use the Entity Framework. If you ask about the Entity Data Model in particular, the key thing is that it enables developers to reason about and write queries in terms of a higher-level conceptual model rather than the relational database schema of tables, joins, foreign keys, and so on. Many enterprise systems have multiple applications/databases with varying degrees of normalization, different schema styles, and different naming conventions for tables and columns. Furthermore, in complex systems the entities of interest may be scattered across multiple rows in multiple tables, and changes to the logical schema can be painful to track within applications. By adding an additional level of abstraction, the EDM insulates developers from the low-level details of the logical model, and frees them to focus on the essential aspects of the application/problem at hand. For more information, see Introducing the Entity Framework.
The EF Design blog is intended to significantly increase the transparency of design for the EF. The Entity Framework team also launched a website that allows you to easily submit and vote on feature requests for the EF: http://ef.mswish.net/.
The following tools help with debugging and troubleshooting:
The content on this site resides on the Microsoft Technet Wiki. As a wiki, it is very easy to contribute to. The only thing you have to do in order to get set up to contribute is go here (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/129.aspx) and sign up. What this consists of is getting a Windows Live ID, and registering a Display Name so you can earn points, which count towards attaining MVP status.
Once you do that, you are good to go, and can edit and create wiki topics at will. If you haven’t worked with wikis before, the above link has further links that will introduce you to the process. The easiest way to start is to edit an existing topic. The FAQs are divided into categories, and each category is a separate wiki topic that contains multiple questions. So if you want to add to an existing question, that is probaly the easiest thing to do. If you have a new queston that fits into an existing category, you can also do that pretty easily: just try to be consistent with the existing styles. Questions that don't fit into existing categories are a bit harder: you will need to create a new Category page, and add it to the table of contents. Perhaps a simple solution would be to add a Miscellaneous category, and only add other new categories when enough questions arise to populate it.
The existing content reflects the latest Entity Framework version that had been released when it was written: version 4.0. So content relating to the following is not there:
Glad you asked! There were two main reasons:
The old website will not be maintained: at some point we will add a link to this site.
Well, the truth is, Microsoft is experimenting with different ways to involve the community. We have been doing wikis for a relatively shorter period of time, and are still experimenting: the Technet wiki site was available for us to use, and doing so allows us to focus on the best ways to engae with the community, rather than on learning a new technology and all the associated infrastructure. At the present time, this wiki is a very convenient testbed for us as we learn to use this medium. Although this content is on Technet, our main audience is you the developer.
Entity Framework FAQ: Introducción (es-ES) Russian