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Troubleshooting Entity Framework Connection Strings

Author: Craig Stuntz In an application which uses the Entity Framework, you may see the following error at runtime: MetadataException: Unable to load the specified metadata resource The cause of this error is a missing or malformed Entity Framework connection string. In particular, the cause of this error is the metadata parameter of the connection string. Let’s examine this more…
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In LINQ, Don't Use Count() When You Mean Any()

Author: Craig Stuntz If you have a list, array, or query in a C#/LINQ application and need to check and see if the list is empty, the correct way to do this is to use the Any() extension method: if (q.Any()) { Similarly, you can check to see if any elements in the list…
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Entity Framework Models and Source Control

Author: Craig Stuntz As you’re probably aware, an Entity Framework model is stored in a single XML file, with the extension EDMX. Developers occasionally ask if this means that two people cannot work on the entity model concurrently. My answer to this is, “It depends.”…
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In LINQ, Beware of Skip(0)

Author: Marc Geldon Calling IQueryable.Skip(0) seems like it should be “free.” In other words, since it will have no effect on the resulting data, there should be little to no performance cost for calling it. But this is demonstrably not true in LINQ to Entities, and it…