I know it's not a "programming" question per-se, but come on guys - give me a break here...
I'm working at a large scaled, really slow organization.
We recently started a process to decide on a new ORM technology.
After looking in various forums, and test-programming with NHibernate, I think it's awesome. Only problem is, I know that when I'll say that Entity-Framework is from Microsoft, it will be really hard to convince my management to go in a different direction.
Any suggestions?
Unfortunately I know the feeling. I recently got told that we WOULD be using the Entity Framework at our organisation, where as I had been using LINQ-to-SQL with great success. It's sometimes the lot of a programmer, people who don't know what the consequences are, making the decisions.
My only suggestion is to provide your management with as much clear and unbiased options & arguments as you can. If you haven't already, try the Entity Framework 4 and then provide a series of concise comparisons in the areas that will affect your business.
I would point out that the EF4 is significantly better than the previous version, so if your memory is from that version, take another look.
Good Luck!
Companies are afraid of committing to any technology that isn't supported by a large, well established company for decades. No manager wants to appear like they made an unwise decision or used the "wrong" technology.
IBM has supported Cobol for over 40 years.
When any of these frameworks begin to approach 40 years of support, then companies will be more likely to commit to them,
I have successfully implemented NHibernate on two workplaces now, and I'd have to say the biggest selling point for it is that it's really database-agnostic. On a consulting firm I worked, I had to develop an application where the companies buying it had the right to demand which database they would like to use; one wanted Oracle, another SQL Server, a third MySQL and a fourth wanted the lowest overhead possible, so we went with SQLite for it. Using any other technology would have been unacceptable at best. Although not supported by any IBM-like juggernaut, it's one the most mature ORM solutions out there, with its Java base being a whole lot older and more tested than anything Microsoft has released.
Convincing my current employer was even easier. The team was happily using *gasp* ADO.NET, and spending a whole week debugging a few queries was the norm here. So before I even proposed the idea, I ported my own war-veteran generic data access layer, so that whatever project they assigned me to, I could get a working demo running so fast they wouldn't even believe it. I did my first demo using MySQL in record time, they told me I was to use Oracle, and they literally watched me generate the Oracle database in a matter of seconds. The rest is history. :)