What’s New in EF4.0

Soma has posted a lovely description of what’s new in the Entity Framework for .NET 4.0, including:

• Foreign Key support so you can add a row without requiring you to download an object just to get the foreign key.
• Lazy Loading support so as you traverse a property that is a collection, the data is pulled on demand.
• Plain Old CLR Object support (POCO) so that you can build your own classes and have EF serialize those instead of generating new classes.
• T4-based Code Generation in case you do want classes generated but want to control the code.
• Data binding support for WPF and WinForms.
• WCF support with serialization attribute generation.
• Much better SQL generation so that you can read it better when you need what’s going on over the wire and so that it’s more efficient.
• Much better support for complex return values from stored procedures.

That Soma really knows his stuff! Check it out.