Quickstart

This quickstart illustrates a series of tasks that support the topics in Getting Started (Entity Framework). These tasks are designed to help you become familiar with the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

What You Will Learn

The first task in this quickstart shows you how to create the School database, and then use Visual Studio tools to generate model and mapping information based on a 1:1 mapping to tables in the database. In subsequent tasks, you will create a Windows Forms application in Visual Studio, create queries that access data in the School model, bind the query results to display controls to show the results of the queries, and then make updates to objects and persist the changes to the database.

You can download the completed Course Manager as both a Visual Basic project and a C# project from the MSDN Code Gallery Web site.

Requirements

This quickstart is intended for users who are familiar with Visual Studio development and the .NET Framework, but who are new to the Entity Framework. To complete the quickstart, you must have the following software installed:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

• The .NET Framework 4.

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or later with Database Services, or the Express edition of SQL Server 2005 or later.

Estimated time to complete this tutorial: 30 minutes.

Entity Framework Quickstart Tasks

• Creating the School Sample Database
  Create the School database schema and load data into the database.

• Creating the Course Manager Application
  Create a Windows Forms application to access data in the School model.

• Generating the School Entity Data Model
  Use Visual Studio tools to generate model and mapping information based on the School database.

• Querying Entities and Associations
  Create queries against the entities and associations in the School model, and bind controls to the results of those queries.

• Inserting and Updating Data
  Save changes to object data made by using data controls to the School database.

Next Steps

Start the Quickstart.

See Also

Other Resources

Getting Started (Entity Framework)
Entity Data Model
Entity Framework Documentation Samples