Page 109 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Unit 5: Database Access

Notes
Benefits
By using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Epicor has
support for its large data models and created a new version of its flagship product. The
company has also greatly simplified development and reduced traffic to SQL Server by 90%.
Additionally, Epicor has lowered its overall development costs and can bring products and
features to customers more rapidly.
Supports Large Data Models

Because the ADO.NET Entity Framework 4 can support large data model sizes, Epicor
could use the technology to create Epicor 9.05. “The earlier version of the Entity Framework
did not handle our data model size very well, and we experienced delays in testing,” says
Johnson. “Those problems have all been solved with the ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.”

As a result, Epicor did not have to create its own in-house data access solution. “Initially,
we planned to write our own data access layer because of our data model size and the
unique behavior of our application, which we needed to replicate in our data access tier,”
says Johnson. “The ADO.NET Entity Framework 4 gave us the data model size support
and performance we needed, so we did not have to spend time and effort writing our own
solution.”
Simplifies Development
With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4, Epicor developers took advantage of
the flexibility of the T4 code-generation templates when creating Epicor 9.05. “The ADO.
NET Entity Framework 4 separates the data model from the code that it generates,” says
Johnson. “The T4 templates drive what the code looks like, and that made it easier for us to
edit those templates so the code turned out exactly the way we wanted it to look.”
Epicor developers also made use of the new parallel programming model in the .NET
Framework 4 and the new features in Windows Communication Foundation to further
simplify development of Epicor 9.05. “Using parallel extensions in the .NET Framework 4,
we can do batch processing on the database by reading records and then creating tasks that
can be handled in the background,” says Johnson. “Our developers no longer have to create
and manage threads to do that.”
With the simplified configuration made possible by the new version of Windows
Communication Foundation, developers can also create Web services more easily. “We have
about 1,000 Web services in Epicor 9, and our developers used to create 1,000 entries in a
configuration file to create the endpoints,” says Johnson. “With Windows Communication
Foundation in the .NET Framework 4, only one entry is required for all of those Web services
in Epicor 9.05.”
Reduces Server Requests by 90%

By using the new T4 code-generation templates, Epicor could modify templates and build a
new API into its solution. “We combined the idea of compiling queries and caching query
results because of the template flexibility,” says Johnson. “Now, we can look in the ADO.
NET Entity Framework 4 object state manager to check if a row was already there, or if it
was already retrieved using the exact same query with the same parameters.”
With these new streamlined development processes, Epicor has reduced the load on
SQL Server and increased the overall application responsiveness. “We conducted some
performance tests recently with existing code, and we were able to reduce the requests to
SQL Server by 90%,” says Johnson. “That is because of the ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.”
Contd...

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