Win Your Copy - Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework

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Review

Professional ADO.NET 3.5 is divided into five top-level parts. The chapters in each of these parts focus on a particular aspect of data acces in .NET 3.5.

Part I: Getting a Grip on ADO.NET 3.5

The chapters of Part I provide some background on LINQ, the Entity Framework and Entity Data Model. They really introduce the rest of the book. They are definitely work reading but will not be as useful for reference material as the remaining parts of the book.

Part II: Introducing Language Integrated Query

Part II starts with a chapter about .NET Framework features that support the LINQ implementation. Some of these are Collection Initializers, Anonymous Types, and Lambda Expressions. This chapter will be helpful to all .NET developers who are unfamiliar with the new language and framework features.

The next two chapters dive deep into LINQ operators and expressions, those that are common across LINQ implementations and some features specific to LINQ to Objects.

Part III: Applying Domain-Specific LINQ Implementations

This part of the book features chapters specific to LINQ to SQL, LINQ to DataSet and LINQ to XML. These are great reference material. If you are not currently working with any of these implementations, you can probably skim over Part III.

Part IV: Introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Part IV begins by giving a brief history of Entify Framework (EF), talking about where Microsoft is going with it, and touches on the contraversial "ADO.NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence" that was signed by a large number of .NET developer community members.

Chapter 9 discusses data abstraction and how that is acheived with the Entity Framework. There is some material toward the end of the chapter about Entity SQL and LINQ to Entities that is very useful.

Chapter 10 discusses the layers of abstraction in EF and chapter 11 provides more details about Entity SQL and how it differs from Transact-SQL.

Part V: Implementing the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Now that the foundation has been laid for a solid understanding of LINQ and EF, the final part of the book has chapters that provide a deep dive on implementing EF in your .NET applications. Topics include LINQ to Entities, Updating Entities, Data Binding with EF, and ADO.NET Data Services.