Another good remarkable point regarding SQL Azure is the reuse of our
existing skills with ADO.NET Entity Framework. As the SQL Azure connectivity
using ADO.NET is possible, it opens the door for Entity Framework as well.
Abut ADO.NET Entity Framework
ADO.NET Entity Framework is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework from
Microsoft. It provides the flexibilities like tables to entities, relational
mapping to properties, Data operations to encapsulated methods etc.
Surely it gives the advantages of:
- Wrapping of database in Object Oriented Manner
- More Manageability
- More Flexibility
- Less Development Time
But everything comes at the cost of learning. You can find more information
here.
Creating Schema
Create a new Windows Azure project and add a new web role into it. After that
right click on the project and use Add > New Item. In the appearing dialog
choose the Data item from the left pane and ADO.NET Entity Data Model from the
right pane.
Enter the names as MyModel as shown above. Click the Add button to continue to
see the following screen.
In the above dialog choose the default option (Generate from database) and click
the Next button to continue.
In the appearing dialog choose your existing connection from the drop down list
and click Next to continue..
You will be prompted with the login dialog above. Enter your user name and
password to continue. (The Save my password option saves the password to the
connection string in config)
In the next dialog, select the tables as shown below and click Finish button.
This will generate the entity data model files in your project. You can see that
the Employee table from previous example is populated in the tables and it
generates the Employee class as shown below.
Note: If your database does not contain the above table, you may need to
create the table and repeat the operations.
Summary
In this article we have explored the scope of using ADO.NET Entity Framework on
SQL Azure. The possibilities give us more flexibility, control and reuse of our
existing ORM skills. The source code attached contains the Entity Data Model
code. You need to change the database name, user name and password in the
configuration file.