Microsoft Entity Framework Beta 3 released

Microsoft has released Entity Framework Beta 3 and has officially announced that ADO.NET 2.0 and third party database vendors have agreed to support the framework. Entity Framework Beta 3 provides data access APIs for .NET 3.5. It is the next version of Framework Beta 2 which was released in August.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest from Microsoft technology which supports RTM versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

Beta 3 comes with new features, major performance enhancements and bug fixes. The program manager for Data Programmability team at Microsoft, Elisa Flasko said, “We’ve got faster view generation, some simpler generated SQL; we’ve taken a lot of feedback from customers in some of these areas,”

Beta 3 has similarities to SQL such as partial methods in code-generation for certain property changed events. Flasko also said that the changes had been mostly around mapping and in Entity Data Model of Entity Framework.

The Principal consultant at Oakleaf Systems, Roger Jennings said that it was major update. He said that there were considerable improvements in performance which was one of the problems. Everything that was involved with queries was now faster.

Flasko proclaimed that developers who used Beta 2 had to note that there were breaking changes in Beta 3.

The Entity Framework is built on ADO.NET; a connection technology through which third party databases can be accessed using .NET. It provides a conceptual model for database schema which makes easier for developers to program against business logic, according to Microsoft.

Beta 3 requires Entity Framework Tools December 2007 CTP, which is available for download on MSDN.

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December 8, 2007 | Filed Under Software