Question

I’m creating a Custom Membership Provider to be shared across all my MVC3 and ASP.NET applications. I started with some sample code I found on CodeProject. While everything is going great, I’d like to move away from Linq-to-SQL that was used in the sample code, and move into EF4.

I’ve read a few samples on line and some tutorials. I’ve got very little experience with ORM, but would like to expand on that. Right now though, I need to understand the difference between the three Entity Generators. I have the following options…

ADO.NET EntityObject Generator
ADO.NET POCO Entity Generator
ADO.NET Self-Tracking Entity Generator

My objects are pretty much already defined in the database. I’ve also already got classes mapped to the database using the link-to-sql. For example, my User.

[Table(Name = "User")]
    public class User {
        [Column(IsPrimaryKey = true, IsDbGenerated = true, AutoSync = AutoSync.OnInsert)]
        public int UserID { get; set; }
        [Column]
        public string UserName { get; set; }
        [Column]
        public string Password { get; set; }
        [Column]
        public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
        [Column]
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        [Column]
        public string LastName { get; set; }
    }

Of the three options available what should I be starting with? Or is there another option I’m not aware of? Or, can someone at least provide enough info for each so I can make the decision on my own?

I was hoping I could get this done quickly, but it appears as if using an ORM may be more work than creating stored procs in the database and DTOs in code. Any help or links would be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

There is a list of some tutorials available in this question.

This is a useful Entity Framework forum.

For me, the most useful reference for learning about the Entity Framework when I started using it was Daniel Simmons’ FAQ. Check it out!