How can I approach application programming from a database background? [closed]

Entity Framework is an Object-Relational Mapper; it translates the results of SQL queries into objects and collections. For example, this query:

SELECT name, address, city, state, zip FROM customers;

might produce a collection

IEnumerable<customer> result

of objects that looks like this:

public class Customer
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string State { get; set; }
    public string Zip { get; set; }
}

What happens from there depends on your application's structure. The ASP.NET server may expose a series of REST services that produce JSON or XML that is consumed by the Silverlight app (the usual arrangement):

 {
     "firstName": "John",
     "lastName": "Smith",
     "age": 25,
     "address":
     {
         "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
         "city": "New York",
         "state": "NY",
         "postalCode": "10021"
     },
     "phoneNumber":
     [
         {
           "type": "home",
           "number": "212 555-1234"
         },
         {
           "type": "fax",
           "number": "646 555-4567"
         }
     ]
 }