HELP! Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition Again

[kenneymyers]

So Entity Developer is working fine in standalone mode but inside of Visual Studio the tool/extension basically will not load a model or connect to the database. Pretty sure this is just because I am not able to find any documentation on actually using the product inside of visual studio. The documentation for the standalone app seems fine, but I'm completely missing it for inside of Visual Studio. I also have searched the web to find any video tutorials to see if I am missing something but alas I'm not finding any of those either. I really want to use this inside of visual studio 2019 so I would love it if anyone out there knows how to get started and can explain any gotchas they have encountered and conquered.

[kenneymyers]

Okay so for those of you that just want to get started (like I did). Here is the very simple process to make this work that is not described anywhere that I could find it at least in the help files or on the website:

After you install Entity Developer and fire up VS 2019 Community:
1) Create a new project
2) In my case ASP.NET Core Application (ASP.NET Core 3.1 MVC template)
3) Right click on your project in the project explorer choose Add and New Item > Data > Devart EF Core Model
4) Choose Database First
5) Connect to your database (Mine is an Azure SQL instance)
6) Select Generate from Database and press Next
7) Select the Tables/Views you want to model
8) Select all of the defaults down to the finish and you should have your model
9) Install Nuget for Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore
10) Install Nuget for Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Relational
11) Install Nuget for Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer (or whatever your database provider is)
12) Build your project to make sure it compiles then use your new model(s)

Everything is working fine it's just not crystal clear (at least for me) on how to get started. Hope this helps someone else because this is a great tool!

[kenneymyers]

So the above works for loading it the first time but if I close and reopen that same project where all the generated files are it doesn't read them (the files show in the project explorer) but Entity Developer seems to not recognize them and won't bring the model back up. So if anyone has the steps for after the first time you run Entity Developer please hook me up with those! Thanks!

If you can point me to any documentation (not of the standalone app I get that just fine). I am trying to find documentation on the Visual Studio tools. I feel like it's a real shame that a full tutorial for this doesn't exist. I would be happy to create one but it is incredibly not intuitive. This could be the best job of not describing a paid/commercial product I have seen in a very long time. In fairness it is possible that there is a bug and/or my environment isn't setup in a way that this tool is expecting (maybe it is just supposed to work but that isn't happening).

[Shalex]

So the above works for loading it the first time but if I close and reopen that same project where all the generated files are it doesn't read them (the files show in the project explorer) but Entity Developer seems to not recognize them and won't bring the model back up.

Please do right-click on *.efml in Solution Explorer > Open With > select Entity Developer, press Set as Default, then OK.

If you can point me to any documentation (not of the standalone app I get that just fine).

The functionality of a standalone Entity Developer and the one integrated into Visual Studio is the same. The documentation is available at https://www.devart.com/entitydeveloper/ ... eloper.chm (download, right-click on *.chm > Properties and press Unblock if its content is not displayed). Open the documentation and navigate to ORM Support > Entity Framework Core > Creating Models.

[kenneymyers]

I tried that multiple times to no avail. It is like it just doesn't detect your model files. Is there something that could block that and make the option not accessible from the right click menu?

[kenneymyers]

I see so it is not automatically detecting your file extension I see. I will try the Open With method you are mentioning. Thank you! It's a great tool but at least for me you could explain how to use it much better. I could not find this in the help files and you would kind of expect that the tool would automatically detect it's own files (having to tell it what to open the file with is kind of unusual). That's just my 2 cents, but glad to have a solution either way.

[Shalex]

I could not find this in the help files and you would kind of expect that the tool would automatically detect it's own files (having to tell it what to open the file with is kind of unusual).

That is the issue with Visual Studio because it loses file association of *.efml with Entity Developer and opens it with XML Editor.