Sharp Interface

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a term applied to integrated software systems used to manage the internal and external resources of an organization. These include the physical assets, financial resources, materials and human resources (or staff).

Benefits of ERP

Implementing a good ERP application will deliver key benefits including:

1.Integrated business processes

2.One central database with no duplication of data

3.A single ‘view of the truth’

4.Easy-to-use, powerful reporting across the whole suite (and therefore the whole organization)

5.The same look-and-feel across the whole system, making training and using the ERP very straightforward.

An ERP system facilitates the flow of information between all business functions inside the organization and links to outside stakeholders such as customer and supplier systems. The key objective of implementing an ERP system is to bring together the disparate functions of the organization into a single system environment and therefore make the operations run more efficiently.

Entity Framework

Writing and managing ADO.Net code for data access is a tedious and monotonous job. Microsoft has provided an O/RM framework called "Entity Framework" to automate database related activities for your application.

Microsoft has given the following definition of Entity Framework:

The Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework is an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework that enables developers to work with relational data as domain-specific objects, eliminating the need for most of the data access plumbing code that developers usually need to write. Using the Entity Framework, developers issue queries using LINQ, then retrieve and manipulate data as strongly typed objects. The Entity Framework's ORM implementation provides services like change tracking, identity resolution, lazy loading, and query translation so that developers can focus on their application-specific business logic rather than the data access fundamentals.

Entity framework is an Object/Relational Mapping (O/RM) framework. It is an enhancement to ADO.NET that gives developers an automated mechanism for accessing & storing the data in the database.

Entity framework is useful in three scenarios. First, if you already have existing database or you want to design your database ahead of other parts of the application. Second, you want to focus on your domain classes and then create the database from your domain classes. Third, you want to design your database schema on the visual designer and then create the database and classes.