How To Count Associated Entities Without Fetching Them In Entity Framework

Question

I\'ve been wondering about this one for a while now, so I thought it would be worth using my first Stack Overflow post to ask about it.

Imagine I have a discussion with

Answer 1

I don't have a direct answer but can only point you to the following comparison between NHibernate and EF 4.0 which seems to suggest that even in EF 4.0 there is no out of the box support for getting counts of a related entity collection without retrieving the collection.

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2010/01/05/nhibernate-vs.-entity-framework-4.0.aspx

I've upvoted and starred your question. Hopefully someone will chime in with a workable solution.