In Which We Painlessly Scope the Lifespan of the Entity Framework Context

In the previous post of this pair, we covered where non-barbarian (and non-physicist) developers can hook their business logic code when using the ADO.NET Entity Framework. To round out the set, we will A the frequently-asked Q of when we should instantiate the ObjectContext, and when we should run it out to the curb for the GC. IMHO AFAIK. LOL.

ObjectContext != DbConnection

If you are coming at the Entity Framework from an old-timey ADO.NET perspective, you might align the idea of a data context ...

NOTE:  I am running Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition, so any references to or images of Visual Studio 2010 are from that version.

In Which We Take Care of Business with the Entity Framework

There are few phases of application development that I want to have done with faster than running plumbing from the database. Some of us, bless the cockles of their tiny hearts, live in ORM-land and love it. As for me, I'll take the path of least resistance every time with regard to this drudgery, because I have features to code and a user interface to build. And at the moment, the path of least resistance means using the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

The Entity Framework does a bang-up ...

Once of the common pain points for me as a developer is deploying database changes from my development environment (generally my laptop) out to a test/staging server.  It's not always a great idea to just blow away the test/staging database and replace it with my local copy, as there may be other things in place that I don't want to get rid of.  Besides, there are usually differences between the security/user configurations on my local machine as compared to my test/staging servers.

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