I have an application using EF code first. Unfortunately the first query takes an awful lot of time to load. When I goggled, I realized this is a quite common problem. Obviously EF needs to init/generate some views in order to work properly.
To speed this up, it's possible to generate pre-compiled views. But all solutions I found use the EF Power Tools. Unfortunately it's not possible to install the Power Tools in VS Express, at least I haven't found a way (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Is there any way to generate the views without the power tools? (maybe command line?)
Ciao, Dante
Yes, it's possible. The actual logic to create the views is not part of EF PowerTools, but part of EF itself. EF PowerTools merely provides a nice easy-to-use menu item for it.
There are a few approaches you can take, but probably the simplest is to use a T4 template. The ADO.NET Blog has an entry on this, but there are newer ready-to-use templates available online from the VS gallery, such as this one; you may need to tweak it or look for a different one if you're not using EF6 though. Templates should install and work in any version of Visual Studio, even the Express editions, but should you encounter difficulties, as a last resort it should always be possible to unpack the downloaded file (it's a zip file) and copy the required file into your project manually.