Yep, I'm having awful problems with this book too. page 78 creating a StoreManagerController, when selecting New Data Context, ok and Add, VS throws an error saying that the fields have no primary key!!! I have another post here somewhere with the EXACT error being thrown. I was under the impression that Entity Framework creates the database by Modelling the Code in the Classes, either this is false or the book is wrong (either by being badly written or badly formatted by the publisher) and a complete and utter waste of time and more importantly money.

I bought the book hoping it would fare better than the online version which was also frought with bad formatting, e.g. telling the user to run the application and expect results that weren't possible because the code to facilitate this hadn't yet been presented to the student. What is the point of asking someone to do something in part 2 when the code required to do so doesn't appear until part 4?

Don't they have proof readers working for the publisher to ensure the text is correct or not?

I remember that I did it exactly as the book says and it worked fine for me.

If EF cannot figure out Primary Keys of your fields, may be you should take a look at your model classes. You can either use "naming conventions" - fields with "id" in their names, or apply attributes - [Key]

And, guys, I do not want to offend anyone, but the book is in "Professional"-series. The readers are supposed to have certain experience in .NET and in Web-programming. The book does not take you by the hand and goes exactly "step by step" as books for beginners do.

If you find it difficult to follow its tempo, may be you should start with grasping the basics of ASP.NET MVC. On asp.net/mvc website there are FREE Pluralsight videos by Scott Allen. Take some time to watch them and I think you will find the book easier to follow afterwards.

Hi, thanks for the reply, have gotten a little further now, there must of been a glitch somewhere. I scrapped my project and started again from scratch, it seems to be working a little better. But I still maintain that the book is NOT written as well as it should be. However, I will persevere, it's the only way to learn :)

having gotten up to page 97 I find the methods given in "To Get or to Post" nonsensical. It's all well and good giving code examples for a "form action" and then an "ActionResult", but this is not going to work when the author (or printer/publisher) has omitted to tell the reader the vital part of instantiating the following in the the HomeController:

MvcMusicStoreDbContext _storeDb = new MvcMusicStoreDbContext();

Without the above code placed in the HomeController.cs class the application fails and there is no mention of it in the book! The only thing I can say I have actually learned thus far, is to never buy another book published by Wrox.

How is the reader supposed to know this? They cannot pluck this out of mid air. A shockingly bad example by any standards, no wonder so many potential coders give up the ghost when they are presented with such poor examples and at great expense to boot, these books do not come cheaply.

The code snippet on page 97 shows only the "Search"-method of the HomeController. And it's an example for the discussion of whether to use HTTP GET or HTTP POST.

Normally you should create DBcontext in the controller, not inside the action. And that's why it's not the snippet.
And the action is SO OBVIOUSLY using the storeDB as dbContext by LINQ-query.

Go back to Chapter 4 on models and read again. Or better yet, learn some basics of Entity Framework and LINQ. These technologies are separate from ASP.NET MVC and are not supposed to be explained in every little detail.