Entity framework query designer

Question

SQL Server has great query designer that enable me to write every complex queries easily. recently I'm involving with Entity framework. I know it has three ways to querying data.

1. LINQ to Entites
2. Entity SQL
3. Query Method

Is there any query designer for Entity framework like SQL query Designer ? I'm familiar with LINQ PAD and also this LINQ query Designer(I was unable to use this software in windows 7 64 bit). what are your suggestions?

Answer 1

LINQPad is probably one of the best. I really like that is shows me what the SQL was that was generated from my LINQ query and I can even look at the IL code.

It doesn't have a graphical designer like the SQL Query Designer and this isn't a bad thing. If you really want something like that you may as well just have that tool generate the SQL for you. LINQ is querying data in C# and if you're querying the database then this is an abstraction. A graphical designer for LINQ would be like layering a layer on top of an abstraction. There would be even more places the interpretation could go wrong and the SQL Query Designer is far from perfect. I can't tell you how many times at my work people bring queries built with that tool to me and complain something doesn't work and I see that they have multiple joins that are just incorrect or subqueries that make no sense.