Entity Developer Express Short Description:
Entity Developer Express is a free modeling and code generation tool
Entity Developer Express Long Description:
Entity Developer is a free powerful modeling and code generation tool for ADO.NET Entity Framework, NHibernate, and LINQ to SQL. You can use Model-First and Database-First approaches to design your model and generate C# or Visual Basic .NET code for it. It introduces new approaches for designing ORM models, boosts productivity, and facilitates the development of database applications.
Entity Developer Express for SQL Server is a free limited version of Entity Developer for SQL Server. The Express Edition does not allow customization of code templates and is limited to 10 entities in the project.
Visual ORM Model Designer with Code Generation
Entity Developer allows you to create and edit Entity Framework, NHibernate, and LINQ to SQL models visually, without typing a line of XML code. It supports editing storage part in GUI and creating all kinds of mapping, such as table splitting, mapping entity to several tables, complex types, inheritance hierarchies, creating entities from SELECT statements and methods from SQL code, etc. Code generation is very flexible due to using T4-like templates.
Integration to Visual Studio
Entity Developer seamlessly integrates with Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. You may edit your Entity Developer models as Visual Studio documents, in the same way as EDM models.
Model-First Approach
Model First approach implementation in Entity Developer offers automatic synchronization of mapping and storage part with the conceptual part of the model and easy to use wizards for synchronizing database with the model.
Updating Model from Database
Entity Developer for SQL Server provides possibility to synchronize your entity model with database with the help of Update from Database Wizard. It tries to preserve manual changes to the model where possible.
Data Viewing/Editing
Entity Developer allows executing HQL, LINQ, or Entity SQL queries against the model, and viewing/editing data.