EF Nightly Builds Available
A couple of months ago we announced that we are developing EF in an open source code base. As part of our ongoing effort to make it easier to get involved in the next version of EF and provide feedback we are now making nightly builds of the open source code base available.
There is a Nightly Builds page on our CodePlex site that provides instruction for using nightly builds.
Be sure to check out the Feature Specifications page for information on the features that are being added to the code base.
We make no guarantees about the quality or availability of nightly builds.
Entity Framework Team
Comments
Anonymous
September 17, 2012
Will there be any additional improvments to inheritance support in this release?Anonymous
September 18, 2012
@lynn eriksen - We don't have anything planned at this stage.Anonymous
September 18, 2012
@Lynn Eriksen: in any case, could you please elaborate on what kind of improvements you would like to see in inheritance?Anonymous
September 18, 2012
Will there be PDBs on SymbolSource like for ASP.NET nightlies? We'll be happy to help set it up.Anonymous
September 18, 2012
What about view generation? Why does it take so long? Somewhere you've mentioned that the algorithm you use is exponential is the worst case. Is the problem inherently exponential? (from a 1000feet view, it does not seem to be). Or, maybe, a smarter, faster algorithm is possible? I'm pretty good at algorithms, if you don't have the time or the priority is too low, I can try to do this. Can you please make more information available, either publicly or just to me, so that I'll be able to try? Currently, this is the major problem in our project, with just 300+ tables, and 80 seconds for the release code.Anonymous
September 19, 2012
@TripleEmcoder - Yes, we plan to publish the PDBs too.Anonymous
September 19, 2012
@Alireza Haghshenas - Because of the complicated mappings that EF supports, the view generation code is very complex. However, there is definitely room for simplification and improvement in the code. Here at Microsoft we're working on some ideas to improve it. If you are interested in looking at it then by all means start up a discussion on the CodePlex site and we'll happily discuss it. Just be aware that it is some very complicated code and any changes would need to continue supporting all the mapping scenarios that are possible with EF today. Perhaps the best place to start would be to take a quick look at the code.Anonymous
September 19, 2012
@Alireza Haghshenas - to add to Rowan's comment. To improve the startup time of your application you can use pregenerated views. It will take approximately the same amount of time to create these but this is at compile time not at runtime. When you do this your application should not need to generate views and therefore it should start much quicker. Note, that each time you change your model you will need to re-generate the views.Anonymous
September 19, 2012
@Pawel. Yes, before changing to Code first, we used to pregenerate views with the T4 template. Now, the power tools just throws an exception. The point is that by increasing the number of tables this time will get much worse. The model microsoft reports about, has about 1000 tables and about an hour to generate views. This is almost impractical even in compile time. On the other hand, suppose that there is another algorithm in, let's say, polynomial time. Why not to devise and implement it? @Rowan Miller OK, I'll start that. By making more information available, I meant expressing the problem in a more abstract manner than the implementation details, so that one can focus on the difficult aspects of the problem. BTW, if there is no such information, or if for some reasons it cannot be shared, I'll start with the code, as you suggested. ThanksAnonymous
September 19, 2012
@Alireza Haghshenas - some time ago I created T4 templates for generating views for Code First applications. They are posted to the Visual Studio gallery. Here is the blog post describing how to get them: blog.3d-logic.com/.../entity-framework-codefirst-view-generation-templates-on-visual-studio-code-gallery EF Team understands that view generation is causing pain and we are looking at what we can do about this.Anonymous
September 20, 2012
Good work Entity Framework Team. Keep it up! I hope to see more open source from Microsoft in the future. It would be great if they did the same with the .NET Framework itself.Anonymous
September 24, 2012
Does it work with .net 4.0 (including enum support) as promised?Anonymous
September 25, 2012
@Gregory - The nightly build doesn't contain the .NET 4 assembly yet. But .NET 4 support is checked into the code base.