In designing the Entity Framework, Microsoft set out to create a platform agnostic means to allow developers to communicate easily with the database that underpins their desktop or server applications, and with WCF RIA Services, this principle was further extended to the Silverlight platform. Each of these frameworks provides developers with an almost ideal solution to promote data persistence (the controlled retrieval and return of data to an underlying database) but falls short of providing them with an easy way to create the application logic and interaction with bound GUI controls that forms such an intrinsic part of most applications that are being built nowadays. DataSource for Entity Framework has been specifically designed to meet this shortfall. It enhances both frameworks by providing additional functionality and improving overall application performance. In short, it provides developers with the means to speed up the development of typical line of business applications and write less code to achieve their goal.

The following topics will examine these performance-enhancing features of the C1DataSource in more detail, but we’ll begin by examining the critical improvements it makes to the two core frameworks.

Following is the list of assemblies that are used in a WinForms application using a C1DataSource control.