Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here are some links to get you started:
- Entity Framework - ArgumentException on Connection
"A common error while initialising an EntityModel from a WCF Service is the following message: ArgumentException was unhandled by user code - The specified named connection is either not found in the configuration, not intended to be used with the EntityClient provider, or not valid. "
- Entity Framework and Stored Procedures
"SQL Server has a large fanbase of stored procedures enthusiasts. Including obviously DBA's, but also developers. The latter foremost considering that with storedprocs you can easily shovel responsibility at those who are responsible for maintaining data-integrity.
Unfortunately, the ADO.NET Entity Framework in its current version has some limitations when working with stored procedures. How to cope with this?"
- LINQ and Dynamic Query Expressions
"By tradition it was always quite a challenge to create custom filtering on objects and dynamically query databases. Or to say least a lot of work. LINQ makes this type of querying in code much easier. In this article I wish to elaborate on the "how-to" and advantages of providing a dynamic and type-safe 'engine' for developers on which you can query any random property.
We are going to demonstrate this by using an expression tree, available from the System.Linq.Expressions namespace, to easily achieve dynamic LINQ queries for usage in your code."
