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I'm sure this is old news to pretty much everybody, but I just wanted to take a minute to post my feelings on this subject. According to multiple sources, including one blog post (and associated comments) , the designer for the Entity Data Model will not ship with the RTM version of Orcas. It's still kind of nebulous as to whether we'll get an out-of-band release (Expression Data maybe?) or whether we'll have to wait for VS 10.0.
The bottom line is this: Microsoft is making a tool ... a modelling tool, that allows you to model your entities, your database schema, and the mapping between those entities and your database schema. However, they will not be allowing you to visually model anything. In short, we're going to be stuck pulling out our few remaining hairs manually twiddling the XML instead of using a visual designer.
To me, this is bad form and just plain wrong. I think the priorities are in the right place. If the Entity Framework (combined with the power of LINQ) is going to be as impactful as I think it will, then why in the hell would Microsoft make such a huge barrier to entry!?! Any developer with any kind of full schedule is going to take one look at the time it takes to twiddle those XML files and they're going to throw up their hands and probably use something else. Here's to hoping that Microsoft will re-shuffle their priorities and deliver on something unpromised for a change (instead of not delivering on something promised).
I totally agree with your post!
This will be almost useless to ship the Entity Data Model without modelling
tool!
If the other designers included with VS 9.0 are any indication, I suggest
handing the task of this designer off to the Expression team, and give them
the ability to make a really powerful EDM tool.
