Microsoft released a new preview of the ADO.net Entity Framework, this time Beta 3. The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft technology to support the RTM versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Beta 3 is the followup to Beta 2, which was released last August.
ADO.NET 2.0 data providers that have committed to support the ADO.NET Entity Framework include Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, IBM, MySQL, and Sybase. Oracle is not ready yet, but will be added in the near future.
Together with the announcement, MS also announced the agreement with 3rd party database vendors for supporting the new framework.
New in this version are mainly some new features, bug fixes and major performance enhancements. "We've got faster view generation, some simpler generated SQL, we've taken a lot of feedback from customers in some of these areas," said Elisa Flasko, program manager for the Data Programmability team at Microsoft.
"The changes have mostly been around the mapping and in the Entity Data Model of the Entity Framework itself," Flasko said. "As far the LINQ to Entities implementation, it has mostly been fit and finish." Users can, however, now do compiled LINQ query for better performance.
If you already used the Beta 2, it's advised to go through the breaking changes list here.
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