Entity Developer was designed to be a powerful modeling and code generation application for ADO.NET Entity Framework, NHibernate and LINQ to SQL. You can use Model-First and Database-First approaches to design your model and generate C# or Visual Basic .NET code for it.
It introduces new approaches for designing ORM models, boosts productivity, and facilitates the development of database applications. Entity Developer Express for SQL Server is a free limited version of Entity Developer for SQL Server. The Express Edition does not allow customization of code templates and is limited to 10 entities in the project.
Visual ORM Model Designer with Code Generation Entity Developer allows you to create and edit Entity Framework, NHibernate, and LINQ to SQL models visually, without typing a line of XML code. It supports editing storage part in GUI and creating all kinds of mapping, such as table splitting, mapping entity to several tables, complex types, inheritance hierarchies, creating entities from SELECT statements and methods from SQL code, etc.
Code generation is very flexible due to using T4-like templates. Integration to Visual Studio Entity Developer seamlessly integrates with Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. You may edit your Entity Developer models as Visual Studio documents, in the same way as EDM models.
Model-First Approach Model First approach implementation in Entity Developer offers automatic synchronization of mapping and storage part with the conceptual part of the model and easy to use wizards for synchronizing database with the model.
Updating Model from Database Entity Developer for SQL Server provides possibility to synchronize your entity model with database with the help of Update from Database Wizard. It tries to preserve manual changes to the model where possible. Data Viewing/Editing Entity Developer allows executing HQL, LINQ, or Entity SQL queries against the model, and viewing/editing data.
What's New in This Release:
· The "Close the window when the generation completes successfully" option in the Generation Process window is implemented in the standalone Entity Developer
· The bug with availability of the New Blank Template option of the Templates context menu in Model Explorer in the Entity Developer version integrated into Visual Studio is fixed
· The bug with generating invalid code when using MVC View Advanced template is fixed
NHibernate support:
· The bug with generating code by MVC Controller template is fixed
· The bug with saving column properties via Column Editor is fixed
Entity Framework support:
· The "Rewrite connection string during regeneration" option (default value is True) of model settings is added to provide the possibility to turn off modifying connection string in *.config after model is saved first time
· The design time support for model-defined functions is added
· The behavior is changed: now connection string is configured with the name of the assembly, ...