ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer Extension Starter Kit

Resource Page Description
The ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer Extension Starter Kit is a Visual Studio project template that helps you understand how to extend the functionality of the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Tools. The project template provides you with a custom Visual Studio project type (ADO.NET Entity Designer Extension Starter Kit) that uses classes in the Microsoft.Data.Entity.Design.Extensibility namespace to build a Visual Studio extension that you can deploy and test. This ADO.NET Entity Designer Extension Starter Kit project type provides you with a project that extends the Entity Data Model Tools in the following ways:

• The Entity Data Model Wizard adds a custom structural annotation to each generated entity type in the conceptual model and displays a message box that contains information about the model generation process.
• The Update Model Wizard adds a custom structural annotation to each added entity type in the conceptual model and displays a message box that contains information about the model update process.
• The ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer (Entity Designer) adds a custom annotation element to entity types when they are selected in the Entity Designer or Model Browser.

This starter kit also contains placeholder classes for customizing other functionality. By writing code for these classes you can do the following:

• Extend the way the Entity Designer loads and saves .edmx files.
• Enable the Entity Designer to load custom files and convert them to .edmx files.
• Enable the Entity Designer to save files in a custom format.

To use the starter kit you should be familiar with the following technologies:

• The Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 versions of the ADO.NET Entity Data Model Tools and the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
• The basic principles of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).
• Basic programming concepts and the Visual C# programming environment.