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In this course we’ll start out by taking a look at the high-level view of this release, looking at what versions of .NET and Visual Studio it supports, and migrating Entity Framework 4 applications. There’s a bit of a trick to doing a migration, but once you know it the process is pretty easy. Then you’ll learn about the most highly-anticipated feature in this release, its support for ENUMS. Next I’ll look at the new support for SQL Server’s spatial data types, as well as support for table-valued functions. The model designer has gotten a lot of love from Microsoft in this release, with the ability to use custom colors for entities and, my favorite, creating multiple diagrams for a single model. We’ll wrap up the course with a look at the performance enhancements provided by Entity Framework 5.

This course assumes that you are experienced with relational database design and programming concepts, and have experience with version 4.x of Entity Framework. Entity Framework is all about data access, and the course doesn’t spend any time on data fundamentals. You’ll also need a good understanding of object-oriented programming in C#, so that you know how to use the entity data objects that Entity Framework generates from your data model. You’ll also need to have a working knowledge of Language INtegrated Queries (LINQ) in C#. The course uses Entity Framework with various SQL Server databases, so you should know enough about SQL Server to know how to perform various tasks and be able to connect to a database. But you don’t need deep knowledge of SQL Server to use Entity Framework productively.