Microsoft finally shows off their EDM designer... but it won't ship with Orcas?!?

First, check out the screencast here.

There are a lot of things that I like about this designer. One, I love the way the green lines dynamically show up to give you really clear visual indications of where each column is coming from and how that column in your entity (conceptual) model is related to a column in the data (physical) model.

I also really liked being able to drag additional source tables into a given destination entity model (what he's showing is an entity set called Users). Let's see, what else do I like.... oh yeah:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO MANUALLY TYPE IN THE FRIGGING XML!!!!

It's about bloody time, folks. For the past (time span that seems like decades) I have been messing around with LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, and the Entity Framework off and on. One thing that absolutely, positively, drove me mad was the fact that all three pieces of the EF - your conceptual model, your physical model, and the mapping between the conceptual and the physical model, were pieced together with manual hand-entered XML. I don't care how cool XML is, no developer should be subjected to memorizing some obscure, one-off XML dialect just so that they can create a conceptual entity model. Here's my thought: it takes weeks of non-stop effort to memorize that crap. In that time, I could've hand-coded my own ORM, built my own business model from that ORM, and plugged it into my application and had it running in that time. If developers have to edit these three files in raw XML format, those developers are going to leave this "product" on the doorstep without opening the package.

So, when I finally saw some screens of this entity designer in action, I was ecstatic. Finally, I could create my entities using a natural, easy-to-use, visual model (*cough* Core Data *cough*) that let me define relationships with easy drag gestures and I could change things, see where things were broken as a result of the change, and so on. It was finally starting to look like a real tool for this product. Unfortunately, according to the sources I can find, the Entity Designer will not ship with Visual Studio Orcas. In other words, Orcas is in CTP and has been functionality-locked. Meaning, no new functionality will make it into Orcas before it ships.

So, let me recap:

Orcas is going to ship with the Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities intact, but you will have to manually type in your own bloody XML to define the conceptual model, physical model, and the mapping between the two!!!

Maybe it's just me, but I am failing to see the value proposition in moving my code from what I have now to the Entity Framework if I am going to have to trudge through those nasty XML files (and believe me, they're nasty.. worse than editing CAML for SharePoint!!) just to set up my entities. Then, if I make changes to the physical model in the database, I then have to modify 2 more XML files, and potentially have to modify 3 XML files every single time I make that change - that's a showstopper. Bottom line is that without that entity designer, I'm going to be using LINQ to run queries against the business objects that I am already using, and I'm going to leave it at that. I won't even bother with the EF until there's a visual designer built into Visual Studio.

My personal opinion is that shipping the EF without a visual designer is shoddy workmanship and a clear lack of understanding of the target audience for that product.

Ok, I'm done griping for the day :)

tags: orcas  ef  entity  entities  adonet  adoef  visualstudio  linq  elinq  

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