Statement of Intent

This blog has been a little quiet for a while now.

With good reason though.

I've been doing the hard yards answering questions on the Entity Framework forum.

To do so I had to ask literally hundreds of questions of the rest of the Entity Framework team. Guys like Colin must be completely sick of me barging into their office by now!

Now because the Entity Framework is a complicated thing, it seems no one person understands it 100%, so while answering questions I've been consciously working on building a kind of mental model to help me understand the Entity Framework.

So aside from the obvious benefit of actually answering forum customer's questions, this exercise has been hugely beneficial for me.

I have learnt a lot about two key things: the Entity Framework itself and more importantly the problems Customers are really having with the Entity Framework.

Those two things have lead to a renewed sense of purpose for this Blog.

<Intent>
I'm going to start creating 'real world' applications using the Entity Framework, and I'm going to blog about all the tradeoffs I make, the hoops I have to jump through, the gotcha's I encounter, the workarounds, the design considerations etc.

So what do I mean when I say 'real world'?

Well I mean applications that you might actually find useful or can relate to: apps with multiple tiers, with a little SOA thrown in, maybe a pinch of mid-tier caching, some data-binding, serialization, validation, auditing, work-flows, thin clients, batch processing, queuing, maybe a bit of WPF, WCF, Biztalk, Office and Sharepoint integration. Basically whatever helps to get the job done.
</Intent>

All I need to get me started, is a real world application. Now while I have lots of ideas, I really want to hear from you.

Anyone have any ideas?

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 27, 2008
  Cool, some suggestions or perhaps just an emphasized subset of what you already listed: have a client that does not communicate with the database, instead all gets and saves go via a service (or separate services) (the save service does validations on saves and updates a cache service); b) the service gets data from multiple sources and puts them together including getting data from the cache you mention (or and other service)...Cheers,-Mat
• Anonymous
  March 28, 2008
  I would like to see your take on a multi tier app using SL2 <-> WCF <-> EFYou should make the app somewhat interesting, in that I mean one that doesnt use northwind or adventureworks, and doesnt have customers, employees or orders.Something around sports would be cool. Like an nfl draft tracker, fantasy football, college football ranking system, etc. If your not into sports then pick your favorite hobby. astronomy, cars, whatever :)
• Anonymous
  April 29, 2008
  Okay so it has been a while since I posted my Statement of Intent . Time to get on with things. The main
• Anonymous
  May 02, 2008
  Today I spent a bit of time working on the data model for my fantasy soccer application. I don't want