Some time ago I showed how to hack the EF Designer shipped with Visual Studio 2012 to work with EF6. Those hacks should be no longer needed – last week we shipped Entity Framework 6 Beta1 which for the first time contains not only EF6 runtime but also contains tooling. The new EF Designer works with Visual Studio 2012 and replaces the designer that was originally shipped with Visual Studio 2012. Almost all the work we did was about adding support for EF6 – being able to handle new metadata types, using the new provider model, creating EF6 specific T4 templates etc. This work has not been completed yet and some scenarios like support for EF6 on .NET Framework 4 or using non-SqlServer (or SqlServerCE) providers when using EF6 are still not enabled but if you want to use model first/database first workflows with EF6 the Beta version is currently your best option. Note that even though this release is mostly about adding support for EF6 we are not abandoning EF5. For EF5 the EF Designer Beta 1 version supports all the scenarios that were supported by the previous versions. You choose the target version of Entity Framework in the wizard when adding a new model to your project (note that in some cases the choice is limited – e.g. if your project already has a reference to System.Data.Entity.dll you won’t be able to select EF6).
It’s not a June CTP kind of thing
EF6 runtime is no longer shipped as part of the .NET Framework and we did not have to do hacks we had to do when shipping tooling in June 2011 CTP. It means that it is easy to install the EF Designer Beta 1 but it is also easy to uninstall it and go back to the original designer shipped with Visual Studio 2012 – just go to Programs and Features, uninstall the new designer and repair Visual Studio and things should work as they did before.
How to get it?
Just go to the download center and install the msi.
We want your feedback
Since the new EF Designer is easy to install and uninstall and it supports all the scenarios supported by the old one I would like to encourage everyone to try it out and let us know about your experience (and issues). This is only a Beta version and we already know it has some rough edges but it may also have bugs we don’t not know about yet. Try it out and if you see something start a new discussion or create a new work item.
Code, the Universe and everything... 