Entity Framework 4 - lifespan/scope of context in a winform application

Question

Sorry for yet another question about EF4 context lifespan, but I\'ve been wondering about this for a while and I do not seem to find the answer. I\'m not very familiar with

Answer 1

Don't create a context for each query. At the same time, don't create a context that gets used for the entire lifetime of a Form (or your application).

Create a context for a single Unit of Work (which can encompass many queries).

That way you have all of your changes encapsulated in the context and you let Entity Framework wrap the database calls in a pretty little transaction without having to worry about it yourself.

I prefer to abstract the Repository and Unit of Work patterns out of the Entity Context so that I can use them independently (which makes everything very clear). MSDN actually has a decent article on the details:

MSDN - Using Repository and Unit of Work patterns with Entity Framework 4