Guide to Entity Framework with

A comparative analysis of Entity 
Framework and other ORM tools
Data access strategies have changed over the years. From 
Remote Data Objects
(
RDO
), 
Data Access Objects
(
DAO
), to ADO.NET, the industry has seen a
marked improvement in the way data is accessed these days.
ORM tools enable you to access data from persistent storage devices without 
having to bother about how the underlying data is actually stored. NHibernate is 
a lightweight ORM tool for .NET. It has a statically compiled counterpart called 
Fluent NHibernate. Fluent NHibernate provides you with an XML-less, compile safe, 
automated NHibernate mapper with LINQ support. Domain modeling is an area 
where Entity Framework scores over NHibernate.

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Introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework
[
 8 
]
Consider the following entity class:
public class User
{
public virtual Int32 UserID { get; set; }
public virtual String UserName { get; set; }
public virtual String CreatedBy { get; set; }
public virtual DateTime CreatedDate { get; set; }
public virtual String ModifiedBy { get; set; }
public virtual DateTime ModifiedDate { get; set; }
}
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The following class illustrates how you can create a mapping for the preceding class 
by extending the generic 
ClassMap
class:
public class UserMap : ClassMap
{
public UserMap()
{
Table("Users");
Id(x => x.UserID).GeneratedBy.Identity();
Map(x => x.UserName);
Map(x => x.CreatedBy);
Map(x => x.CreatedDate);
Map(x => x.ModifiedBy);
Map(x => x.ModifiedDate);
}
}
The following code example illustrates how you can create a data gateway for the 
User
entity class:
using FluentNHibernate;
using NHibernate;
using FluentNHibernate.Cfg.Db;
using FluentNHibernate.Automapping;
using NHibernate.Cfg;

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Chapter 1