What's the best way to share one Entity Framew

Question

A project (a "solution" to say in VS terms) of mine consists of an ASP.Net 4 Dynamic Data Entities web application, some WinForms applications, some WPF applications, some services. All they are intended to work with one SQL Server database, generated from an Entity Framework 4 model as table-per-type, with lots of inheritance and multiple self-referencing relations.

Where do I best put my model? In a separate class library, a copy in every project, in one project, etc. What naming should I best use? Is it good idea to name it MySolution.MyClassLibrary.MySolutionEntities, or just MySolutionEntities or just MySolution? Can you share any useful experience on this subject?

Answer 1

Put your model and any support classes (like additional entity functionality in partial classes, repository interfaces and implementations and validation) into a separate class library. That's by far the best way to share that functionality.

Compile that into its own assembly, and you can reference that from any number of projects - your ASP.NET web apps, your ASP.NET MVC apps, your WPF and Winforms apps, whatever it is you're doing - just add a reference to your EF model assembly.

As for naming - use something that makes sense. Don't "tie it" to a specific project or solution - give it a descriptive name. What is the model - what data is contained in it?

You could name it something like YourCompany.HumanResources.DataModel or whatever - don't make it specific to a project, since you'll likely use it several times in various projects.