Designer file in Entity Framework June 2011 CTP

10 Jul 2011 1 mins Entity Framework

There’s a lot of new stuff coming with the Entity Framework June 2011 CTP – enums and spatial types and … you can find it all around blogosphere. And for sure, I’ll cover my finding as I’ll dive into it. But there’s one, one could call it very minor, improvement, that was in, my opinion, pain in the ass.

Previously, the designer settings, like positions of lines for associations, sizes of entities and even zoom level were stored directly in EDMX file. Hence possibly creating changes in it even if you only read it. But the new CTP solves it. The designer’s content is now in a separate file. So if you’re about to commit to VCS you can much better see what was really changed – whether then model itself or only the designer (and you can ignore designer changes if you want).

Nice isn’t it? Pity that this “bug” made it to the first release. 😎

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.