Once the DDEX Provider has been installed, (which consists of placing the provider DLL on disk, and add a number of registry entries), you can add a connection to any SQL Server Compact 4.0 database from the Toolbox, and it will be added to Server Explorer: (Soon to be included directly in the EF Tools). So my “simple” provider enables you to use the Entity Framework Tools, for example “Generate Model from Database”, “Generate Database from Model”, “Update Model from Database” and also the EF Power Tools Reverse engineer feature. The wizard lets users select which tables, views and stored procedures to include in the model”.

Quote from the included Word document: “Thus, the information shown in the wizard GUI comes directly from the EF provider. are enumerated via code in the Entity Framework provider, not the DDEX provider. In particular the fact that the Entity Framework Tools does not get any information from the DDEX provider apart from the connection information, so all Tables, Columns etc. The latest release of my SQL Server Compact Toolbox, version 3.7.1, currently available in beta release from here, restores the Entity Framework Tools support for SQL Server Compact 4.0 by installing a simple DDEX provider.ĭeveloping DDEX providers is a bit of a dark art, which has put me off even thinking about it, but a recent discussion on CodePlex drew my attention to the DDEX sample provider included with the Entity Framework source code. As described in my blog post here, Entity Framework Tools support for SQL Server Compact 4.0 in Visual Studio 2013 is broken, because SQL Server Compact is no longer supported by Server Explorer in VS 2013.

Ddex Provider Not Installed