"Programming Entity Framework DbContext" by Julia Lerman & Rowan Miller; O'Reilly Media

This is my review of the book, programming entity framework DbContext by Julia Lerman & Rowan Miller, done under the Oreilly Blogger Review Program.

Targeted at developers familiar with, and using entity framework in their applications, especially at places where object context interacts with the core of the framework, this book offers developers all about DbContext API, with the how-tos for dealing with creating customized queries to the database when the built-in mechanism of the framework does not suffice. Julia Lerman is the leading authority on learning Entity Framwork and Rown Miller is the project manager in Microsoft's team of ADO.NET Entity Framework.



The point of having this book is simple, after all that ease of creation of database entity models (and their corresponding configuration files) , one needs to interact them with application code where middle tier code performs interactions with the entities.

The book jumps into the differences between DbContext and ObjectContext at the start and explains the download instructions as well as code examples explaining integration with outside code as well as edmx model designer. It then explains the query part  and demonstrates LINQ queries to interact with the entities using DbSet in an eloquent manner while explaining entitiy retrival in detail (something that is rare to find by in a .NET text). I felt at ease with the details and quality of the coverage of the DbContext API and it almost felt like an in depth coverage into an established ORM tool like Hibernate or JPA while dealing with entities and relationship sets.It then proceeds to explain problems and solutions regarding tracking change of entities without the availability of a database, as the disconnected context state management is a feature which is hard to figure by itself in n-tiered applications.

The second half of the book deals with the newly released contents in the entity framework. It covers change tracker in detail and provides ample code along with the details of the new api. The validation api is also new in the framework and is introduced comprehensively, and some of the examples that I attempted worked correctly. The customization of validations is also covered in detail which is very handy to use in practical applications. The chapter on advanced features is mostly about unit testing with dbcontext, and should be named so instead of its generic name.
The book finishes off with the insight about the upcoming entity framework 5, but lacks any code example as the beta for the same is not out.

Overall, the book follows a style quite similar to a cookbook, but packs in with some well guided theory as well. The lack of appendix is missing, which could be there instead of the last chapter but the rest of the book follows the contents around the topic and is indeed a pleasurable learning experience. For developers looking forward to another .NET book with extensive visuals and wizards, this would come as a disappointment but for those looking to solve their middle tier infrastructure plumbing with proper code, this is the solid reference to  be kept near while developing.
You can purchase this book from here.