EF in real life, I want to believe (Does anyone have good pointers to non-trivial EF 1.0(3.5) or 4.0 examples?)...

Question

I have recently found myself becoming more negative about EF and cannot help wondering if the real problem is my own knowledge on the subject. I have seen many simple/artificial examples of using EF, especially in conjunction with MVC, but I have not yet found any real-life examples of using EF and taking advantage of all the functionality. In addition, every attempt that I have made so far to use EF seems to have been scuppered either by deficits in the VS2008 designer (such as support for server generated fields/columns) or by the need to provide reams of additional code to support updating the data back to the source (where I expected this to be supported by EF).

In order for me to really look into this and make a more educated decision, can anybody point me to some examples of using EF, with ASP.NET for instance, in a real-life situation - such as retrieving some related data from the underlying source, updating that data and then persisting those changes to the source. In any example you can provide, I would like to be able to see only the changes made by the user being sent back to the source rather than simply overwriting the current version.

I would also like to see some examples of being able to use EF in a web service/WCF situation where again an entity is retrieved with related objects and any changes made are persisted back to the data store.

I would prefer as many examples as possible to be using EF 1.0 (3.5) as this is the version that is currently available for production use, but I would also be interested to any EF 4.0 examples that prove things are going to get better.

I want to believe that EF is the way forward. I particularly like the idea of treating a database as if it were simply a bunch of related objects (and have frequently rolled my own versions of this in the past) but it seems that EF only goes so far. I have a couple of new projects on the horizon involving fairly large databases and cannot currently justify the use of EF even though I would really like to.

Answer 1

I think it will be awhile before EF catches up to Hibernate.

Answer 2

I've asked a similar question here which is specific to ASP.NET MVC. I have basically the same question you do in that I have not seen many "real-life" examples of how EF works with a .NET web scenario.

Answer 3

Can't provide you code, but can tell you my experience. Recently tried linq to sql in a real project. It wasn't bad, but it didn't fit with domain driven design (or i just was too dumb to make it look as i would like).

Tried linq to entities. In short - wasted ~2 days. I gave up my hope after first few times i went through editing mappings.

Sticked with NHibernate (cause it does not generate anything). But they all are dissapointing at sproc support.

Maybe next release will be better. At the moment it seems clumsy for me.

Answer 4

See http://dataguidance.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=28998 for the official EF v4 Reference Implementation (features ASP.NET MVC front end).

Answer 5

Good news (at least for EF4). Carl Perry has today released a series of articles on the ADO.NET team blog detailing some of the changes that are going to make life considerably easier. http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/06/22/announcing-entity-framework-feature-ctp-1.aspx

Answer 6

I'm looking for information on EF myself, and when directed to here I found most of the answers here dated after the release of the EF4 CTP4.

It might be the case that someone reading my answer will say that features in the CTP4 are dated as well, so I'd suggest to anyone looking at implementing entity framework for real should take a look at the ADO.net Team Blog and check the latest news