One of the reasons Entity Developer integrates with Visual Studio is that it offers a user-friendly interface for developers. With its help, users may edit Entity Framework and other ORM models in the same way they would normal Visual Studio documents and immediately generate code for these models.
Entity Developers tools are available as Visual Studio windows and can be accessed using the Visual Studio toolbars and menus. This lets you create models for your entity-relationship management (ORM) system without having to write any code, directly from within the Visual Studio solution itself.
Entity Developer can serve as standalone software or build it into your Visual Studio setup. You can use the unit testing and Continuous Integration (CI) deployment features to automatically build your application, down to your unit tests and CI environments.
Creating Entity Data Model
You can create Models for Entity Framework and Other ORMs as well as any other project item – via Add New Item dialog box. Entity Developer makes creating new models as easy as possible. You’ll find this out for yourself when you install the template into Visual Studio.
Be aware that if you want to make an Entity Framework Core Model for any .NET Core or .NET Standard application, you’ll find a suitable template in the ASP.NET Core – Data category instead of the usual Data category.
Entity Developer has a Create Model Wizard for using database-first or model-first approaches to create an empty model or generate a model from a database. Just use the wizard to generate your data-centric documents, choosing your design approach, selecting the database objects for document generation and configuring the model settings.
The Create Model wizard automatically adds NuGet packages to your ASP.NET Core projects if you select an ORM provider that supports the model creation.
Integration into Visual Studio Interface
When you create an Entity Framework Code-First model you have to write code to generate entities from a database. You can also use the built-in editor to edit your entity classes. However, you cannot do this with the ORM model since it is not a code-first model.
Entity Developer windows with useful tools like Model Explorer for viewing model objects, diagrams, and templates, Database Explorer for viewing database objects from the model connection, etc., are available in Entity Developer as usual tool windows.
You can right-click any entity in the designer view and choose Entity Data Model Designer from the context menu. Or you can select the Entity Data Model option on the right-click context menu in the Entity Data Model designer.
Entity Developer’s entity modeling and visual modeling features are also integrated with Visual Studio refactoring. Refactoring a model class or member name in your code will cause all code to get re-fact
Code Generation
Integrated Entity Framework tools for Visual Studio 2015 generates code whenever you save your model. It is also available at runtime as a custom tool so the model can be iterated over on the command line by running a Custom Tool shortcut.
Entity Developer provides template-based code generation that enables custom template creation. Having more than 100 configuration settings, it features a large number of predefined templates.
Entity Developer vs Visual Studio Edmx Designer
Entity Developer allows you to benefit from several commercial advantages over an entity model framework designer for using visual studio. It provides better visual designers for ORM entities, properties, and other model objects, generates better program code, supports larger property models, performs design-time validation of the model by retrieving data via ORM entities, and performs design-time testing of the model by retrieving data via ORM entities.
Entity Developer empowers customers to create Entity Framework Core models using visuals, whereas native Entity Framework tools for Visual Studio don’t facilitate this sort of visual design.