Entity Framework Internals: Private setters and private constructors

I have been heavily learning Domain Driven Design recently and In that there is a concept called “Anemic Domain Model” which we used to use in our project. In simple terms Anemic Domain Models are those classes that do not have any behaviour with them and most of created with properties. You can use them as container for your data from database. While Domain driven design is all about behaviours. So we need to make our models incorporate behaviours also which is called  “Rich Domain models”.

One of step to convert your Anemic Domain Models to Rich Domain Models is to create parameterised constructors. For example an Employee must have FirstName and LastName. So instead of doing validation at the insertion time on UI we should not allow Employee to be created without FirstName and Lastname. The only way to do this to make this properties setters private and assign value of those properties via parameters constructors like below.

public class Employee
{
        public Employee(string firstName, string lastName)
        {
            FirstName = firstName;
            LastName = lastName;
        }
            
        public int EmployeeId { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; private set; }
        public string LastName { get; private set; }
        public string Designation { get; set; }
}

Now, If you want to do DDD with any Object Relational Mappers there will be a problem as most of Object Relational Mappers create properties with public setters. Entity Framework is such a Object Relational mapper and I love to work with Entity Framework.

Continue Reading

Fluent Nhibernate : Create Table from Code(Class- CodeFirst)

Now days,  Convention over configured is more preferred and that’s why Fluent Nhibernate got more popularity Because with Fluent Nhibernate we don’t have to write and maintain mapping in xml. You can write classes to map your domain objects to your database tables. If you want to learn how we can do this with existing database and Fluent Nhibernate, I have also written a blog post about CRUD operation with Fluent Nhibernate and ASP.NET MVC . After writing this blog post I was getting a lots of emails about how we can create database from the Fluent Nhibernate as we can do same with Entity Framework Code First. So I thought it’s a good idea to write a blog post about it instead of writing individual emails.

How to create tables from class via Fluent Nhibernate:

To Demonstrate how we can create tables based mapping classes create we’re going to create a console application via adding new project like below.

Continue Reading

Entity Framework Internals: Enum Support

In .NET world, We all are using Enums in our code. It’s makes our code more readable then using hardcoded numbers of strings. Entity Framework 5.0 or higher version has support for Enums. In this blog post we are going to see how we can use Enums with entity framework.

We are going to create a console application to see how it’s works. I’m going to create a console application for the same.



After creating a application I’ve added Entity framework via Nuget package.

Continue Reading