EF v2 and Data Access Architecture Best Practices

Description

EF Data Access

EF v2 and Data Access Architecture Best Practices

Tim Mallalieu

This article discusses:

Application development styles

Design patterns

This article uses the following technologies:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, ADO.NET Entity Framework Feature CT1

Contents

David Hill, in his preface to the latest patterns & practices Architecture Guidance, jokes that the key to being a good architect is learning to answer "It depends" to most questions. In this article, I'll take that joke to heart. How can you use the Entity Framework with your application architecture? Well, it depends.

Developers deploy a wide variety of development philosophies and architecture styles. This article explores three common perspectives on application development and describes how the Entity Framework can be employed in each. Specifically, I'll look at the forms-centric, model-centric, and code-centric development styles and their relationship to the Entity Framework.

Application Development Styles

I'll start with a discussion of the various development styles. This discussion does not make strong assumptions about particular methodologies that can be applied within these development styles, and I should note that I've used stereotypes for the purpose of this article. Most development styles blend elements of the models I describe. Figure 1 shows the relative characteristics of the models I'll discuss.

Figure 1 Development Styles and Their Associated Tradeoffs

Forms-Centric. In the forms-centric (or "forms-over-data") style of development, the focus is largely on the construction of the top-level user interface (UI) elements that bind to data. The Microsoft development experience for this style is often a drag-and-drop experience in which you define a data source and then systematically construct a series of forms that can perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on the underlying data source. This experience tends to be highly productive and intuitive for a developer. The cost is often that ...

Original URL

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee236639.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee236639.aspx