Programming Entity Framework - Cdn.oreilly.com

Figure 13-1. The simple model that we’ll use in the following examples
Building POCOs by Hand Versus
Generating with a T4 Template
The POCO and related classes created in this chapter are built manually. If you
are starting with a model, it makes much more sense to use a T4 template to
generate the POCO classes from the model. However, in this chapter, the goal is
to provide you with a good understanding of the classes; so we will begin by
building them by hand. Once you know what goes into these classes, you will
have the knowledge you need to properly define a template to do this task for
you. As noted toward the end of this chapter, Microsoft provides a predefined
POCO T4 template and you will also find many that have been created by
developers in the community, provided through their blogs and other resources.
Example 13-1 displays the code listing for the Contact class. Notice that it uses autoimplemented
properties which don’t require a backing variable to retain their values.
When C# 3.0 and VB9 were released along with Visual Studio 2008,
only C# had auto-implemented properties. They were introduced into
Visual Basic 10 which was released along with Visual Studio 2010.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
Example 13-1. A simple Contact class