The ADO.NET Team announced that the "long-awaited" Beta 2 of Entity Framework has finally been released. These are the bits that will work with VS2008 Beta2. And these are the bits that have some of the things I saw Brian Dawson demo in March at DevConnections. It has been torture waiting for them!

The download for the Beta2 is here.

In addition, they have pushed out the first CTP of the Entity Framework Visual Tools. Download is here. That means a visual designer, not just a wizard that creates XML files, for working with the Entity Data Model. I have played with that designer and blogged about it in detail with lots of screenshots here. One note is that the UI currently only lets you work with the Conceptual Layer. All other mods need to be done in the raw xml still.

Danny Simmons, from the Entity Framework team, has an awesome post detailing what's new in the Beta2 for Entity Framework. Not just what's new, but what it means. Each and every point he lists is noteworthy, so rather than cutting and pasting his entire blog post here, it makes more sense to point to it.

And it saves me time, so I can go check out all of these new features myself.