Entity Framework Designer Will Not Be In Orcas RTM
We just got confirmation today from the ADO.Net team over at Microsoft that the EDM Designer will not be in the Orcas RTM bits. Had I been more diligent in reading their blog posts I would have noticed this earlier:
EDM Wizard and Designer Featured in VSLive! San Francisco Keynote – Tuesday, March 27, 2007 8:42 PM by dpblogs
These videos provide some great information and a preview of the new EDM Wizard coming in Orcas, as well as a sneak preview of a new EDM Designer that we can expect to see released after the upcoming Orcas release.
There it is sitting there in bold print way back a month ago and I missed it. This is bad news as most of our reason for using EF was related to the designer being there for our customers.
It seems that at Orcas RTM the only mechanism that will be present for creation of Entity metadata will be a wizard that lets you do a one way generation of metadata from an existing database. Any manual customizations after that point will be lost if you regenerate the metadata. Yikes! This is not very friendly to Agile development where we make plenty of model changes early and often.
Trust me editing the xml files (all 3 of them) is not fun or easy. Sure, after you bang your head against them for about a day or so you start to see how it works. But you go home with an amazing headache and a large amount of frustration knowing that the same thing in ActiveRecord takes about 5 minutes. Guess what I am going to start boning up on next iteration?
