Getting Started (Entity Framework)

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is designed to support data-centric applications and services, and provides a platform for programming against data that raises the level of abstraction from the logical relational level to the conceptual level. By enabling developers to work with data at a greater level of abstraction, the Entity Framework supports code that is independent of any particular data storage engine or relational schema. For more information, see Introducing the Entity Framework.

The Entity Framework supports an Entity Data Model (EDM) for defining data at both the storage and conceptual level and a mapping between the two. It also enables developers to program directly against the data types defined at the conceptual level as common language runtime (CLR) objects. The Entity Framework provides tools to generate an EDM and the related CLR objects based on an existing database. This reduces much of the data access code that used to be required to create object-based data application and services, and makes it faster to create object-oriented data applications and services from an existing database.

The topics in this section are designed to help you understand using the Entity Framework quickly by explaining the underlying technologies in the context of the Quickstart (Entity Framework) tutorial.

In This Section

• Generating an Entity Data Model
  Describes how to derive an EDM from an existing database.

• Mapping a Conceptual Model to a Storage Schema
  Describes how the conceptual model is mapped to the storage model.

• Working with Entity Data
  Demonstrates how to query an EDM and work with object data.

• Quickstart (Entity Framework)
  A tutorial that demonstrates how to create an Entity Framework application.

• Entity Framework Resources
  A guide to finding information and locating Entity Framework resources.

See Also

Concepts

Entity Framework Terminology

Other Resources

Application Scenarios (Entity Framework)
Feature Reference (Entity Framework)