Despite my reluctance to step into the darkside of L2E, I decided that my current project I am forcing myself to use it. It is bound to be (as it has already proven) frustrating and painful, but I think it's a good idea to learn.

First problem I have run into is inserting records with relationships. In L2S, it is very simple and the syntax could not be easier. If I have a record, and it has a relation to a table of cities, I could simply make a new 'record' and set the 'city_id' to the integer primary key of the city table:

linq-to-sql

record r = new record() { city_id = 5 };

But, with L2E, it is not that simple. In the past, I had shown how to relate a record using a full trip to the server to get the entire entity; but that is not efficient and/or the right way to do it. Now why we can't do something more similar to above will hopefully be covered in the next release, but here is as close as I can seem to get the syntax:

linq-to-entities

record r = new record();
r.cityReference.EntityKey = new EntityKey(
  "YourEntitiesNamespace.cities", "city_id", 5);

Now, this is not nearly as clean as the L2S, but it does not require a trip to the db and isn't too bad. You will notice that the record has a property 'cityReference' - this is automatically made by the edmx because there is a foreign key reference in the table from record->cities. Then the new EntityKey just takes in 3 parameters (it is overloaded with other ways to input as well):

• string qualifiedEntitySetName which will be your entityNameSpace.TableName
• string keyName your primary key field
• object keyValue the value in the primary key field