Using EDMX or EDML for entities design

Question

Two quick quesitons:

• Benefits of using EDMLs vs. EDMXs - when would you choose to use one over the other
• DevArt's Entity Developer vs. Visual Studio's Entity Designer - I know this part of the question may be a bit subjective, so I would rather ask which tool does a better job with entity design

I've found that some relations in DevArt's tool are not created. For instance I've a table with self reference (each record with relation to parent record or null when root). DevArt's tool didn't create this reference (I'm using MySQL if that's the issue).

Anyway. I've found Entity Designer in Visual Studio 2008 (even though it's far from being full feature ready) better than DevArt's because of the missed relations.

Answer 1

EDML and EDMX have the same structure and in case of changing the extension can be opened in each tool. EDML diagram is serialized to a separate file. EDML uses Devart code generation.
Several features are not available in Microsoft designer:
- Editable Store model (with Add DefiningQuery and Add CommandText options);
- Flexible Naming Rules;
- Ability to execute LINQ to Entities & Entity SQL queries.
Also we provide a number of additional features like ComplexType, entity splitting, all types of inheritances design time support and so on.
We don't have support for Update from database Wizard yet. But our drag & drop interface allows to delete and add changed database objects from Database Explorer. This operation does not discard changes made to other objects, unlike Microsoft Update from database wizard (it regenerates the whole Store part of the model).