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EF Power Tools Beta 4 Available

  • Article

The Entity Framework Power Tools provide additional design-time tools in Visual Studio to help you develop applications using Entity Framework. Beta 4 of the Power Tools is now available.

Where do I get it?

The Entity Framework Power Tools are available on the Visual Studio Gallery.

You can also install them directly from Visual Studio by selecting Tools > Extensions and Updates… then selecting Online and searching for Entity Framework Power Tools in the Visual Studio Gallery.

What’s new in Beta 4?

Beta 4 updates the Power Tools to work with Entity Framework 6 and Visual Studio 2013. The following issues have also been fixed in this release.

Future of the Power Tools

We’re making an effort to consolidate and simplify the tooling for Entity Framework. As part of this effort, we intend to incorporate functionality from the Power Tools into the Entity Framework Tools for Visual Studio. The Tooling Consolidation feature specification on our CodePlex site outlines some of this work.

Support

This release is a preview of features that we are considering for a future release and is designed to allow you to provide feedback on the design of these features.

If you have a question, we encourage you to ask it on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.

Compatibility

The Power Tools are compatible with Visual Studio 2010 thru 2013 and Entity Framework 4.2 thru 6.0.

There are two specific limitations, however, that you should be aware of:

  • Generate Views won’t work with prerelease versions of EF6.
    It will, however, work with the RTM version when it’s released.
  • View Entity Data Model won’t work with EF6 on Visual Studio 2010.

What does it add to Visual Studio?

The Power Tools are for Code First, model-first, and database-first development and adds the following commands to an Entity Framework submenu inside of Visual Studio.

  • When right-clicking on a C# project
    • Reverse Engineer Code First
    • Customize Reverse Engineer Templates
  • When right-clicking on a code file containing a DbContext derived class
    • View Entity Data Model
    • View Entity Data Model XML
    • View Entity Data Model DDL SQL
    • Generate Views
  • When right-clicking on an Entity Data Model (*.edmx) file
    • Generate Views

For information on using these commands, see the EF Power Tools walkthrough.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 14, 2013
    How about an extension to let you select a diagram, or create a new one within the edmx file, when you right click on it.  At the moment, with multiple diagrams in a file, It's all but inevitable I'll have to open the wrong diagram first, then select the diagram I actually want.

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2013
    Any chance of a release for the Express versions??

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2013
    @Tuppers - Unfortunately the Express SKUs don't support tool extensions, so we aren't able to provide the power tools for them.

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2013
    I used the option to reverse engineer a database to produce tables.  While I love how it removes the "s" from the names of all my plural tables (e.g. it creates a "Lesson" class for the "Lessons" table), it doesn't work for tables that end in "s" but aren't plural like "PageStatus", which results in a class name of "PageStatu".  May want to try running table names through a smarter online "de-pluralizer" first.

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2013
    @wtfChrisD: I don't have a VS 2012 at hand right now to repro this, but in case it helps, the error you are seeing happens sometimes if one of your configuration files is outdated and has the configuration section for EF 5.0. When you install the EF 6 (or the 6.0.1) NuGet package it is supposed to automatically update the configuration section declaration in your application's config file.

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2013
    somethimes i'm using this cool stuf can generate two context class, why suddenly happened?

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2013
    @wtfChrisD: I had the same problem. I had several projects in a solutions and removed entityframework 5 from them. In the config still the reference was showing. I removed them from all where I didn't need them anymore and the problem was gone.

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2013
    @achmad lucky - The context name is taken from the database name. Could it be that you're database name changed? If so, the Power Tools only add/overwrite files - they don't delete files. If that's not the case, can you provide some more details on how to reproduce what you are seeing?

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2014
    I'm using EF power tools beta 4, with VS2013, when I want see my model diagram It works fine for first time, but if I change the entities, EF Power tools show the previous diagram(it does not show the changes) and I have to restart my VS2013. where is the problem do you think?

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2014
    The comment has been removed