>>>>>I make no secret about being a framework guy and a sucker for third party tools. ( I have a fuzzy warm spot for things that make me a lot of money )
>>>>>
>>>>>Long ago, Cetin suggested Ideablade's DevForce to me but only now as I am transitioning to C# and have fallen in love with WPF and the Entity Framework am I really seeing that DevForce 6.07 and its Entity support is the wave of my future.
>>>>>
>>>>>And most impressive is the incredible level of documentation !
>>>>>
>>>>>And apropos of that : DevExpress has been a constant source of delight - both in their amazing documentation, training videos, samples and support.
>>>>>
>>>>>It is a joy to see people really doing it right.
>>>>>
>>>>>I loved what I was doing in the VFP/VFE days, but VS 2010 and these two tools have made all that seem like the days of writing Applesoft.
>>>>>
>>>>>BTW, Julia Lerman is a goddess. She first got me excited about EF in .NET 4.0
>>>>>
>>>>>
http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/seth/archive/2010/11/08/video-julie-lerman-on-entity-framework-4.aspx>>>>
>>>>Hadn't seen that. I think she's definitely right about POCO support opening EF up to a lot more flexibility.
>>>>
>>>>>Good article(s) in the always good Code Magazine :
>>>>>
>>>>>
http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=0909081>>>>>
>>>>>Her book :
>>>>>
>>>>>
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Entity-Framework-Building-Centric/dp/0596807260/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295547023&sr=1-1>>>>
>>>>I've got the book but must admit I didn't find it an easy read. She sure knows her stuff and I learned a lot - but it was hard work. Then again maybe it's not possible to explain EF in terms I find easy to understand :-{.
>>>>Anyway there's not much else in the way of EF books out there.....
>>>>
>>>>>Her videos :
>>>>>
>>>>>
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ff191186>>>>>
>>>>>It was only after going through this stuff that I started to appreciate how cool the stuff Ideablade was doing in DevForce really is.
>>>>>
>>>>>Hope this helps somebody else looking for "what's next"
>>>>
>>>>I just used EF with the Silverlight RIA services templates - that was an interesting experience.....
>>>
>>>"Interesting" is a word that takes in a lot of territory ;-)
>>I chose the word deliberately :-}
>>
>>>How did it go?
>>At first blush all went swimmingly.
>>Then I spent ages trying to fix problems - not helped by the lack of clear understanding in my own head about what was going on under the hood. One example:
>>
>>I had EF mapping an int to an enum. The domain service was clever enough to recognize this and create a copy of the enum definition on the Silverlight side. But my enum definition was in a class file which also contained a custom validator that I needed to share on the client side - but by flagging that file as shared I ended up with two copies of the enum on the client :-{
>>It took me ages to work out what the error was. I could have moved the enum definition to a separate .cs file but didn't like that. In the end I found that using a link instead of a .shared.cs persuaded the code generator to accept that as an existing definition - but I still don't know why that should be the case (maybe it gens the g.cs file before copying the shared.cs - but that wouldn't be clever)
>>
>>Don't know if that makes sense to you - wouldn't have made sense to me a couple of days ago :-{
>>
>>Most of the rest was just down to the learning curve relating to the async nature of data-retrieval on the client side and using some of the toolkit items such as BusyIndicator (v. handy) and DataForm (esp. making it attribute driven from the server side metadata)
>>
>>On top of all this I had used the 'quick and dirty' approach of just embedding the EF and Service code in the web site assemblies and then realized I would need the same web site to host a second Silverlight application - so I had to build that using the more sensible approach of having separate projects for the Silverlight and Domain Server portions. But then trying to work with both paradigms at the same time drove me nuts so I ripped the original app apart and refactored that into separate assemblies as well.
>>
>>Now I'm taking a day off whilst the bug reports accumulate :-}
>
>There really isn't any easy way to get up to speed with a new technology, is there?
I used to rely on osmosis :-}
What you describe is the way it always goes for me. I can be reasonably productive fairly quickly in terms of getting most of it working. But those stray bits can take ages to find and fix.
