What real-world usages of ADO.NET Entity Framework do you know?

Question

Does anyone have real-world experience with ADO.NET EF? Do you know any project based on this framework?

Answer 1

I'm currently working on the GUI part of a EF based project. We do add our own wrappers too though, because some things like ordered N:M relations are not implemented (properly).

There is also some discussion here about switching to NHibernate.

Answer 2

@David Schmitt,

Thanks for quick reply. So, does it ready for production in your opinion? Did you observe some noticeable bonuses over classic ADO.NET / LINQ?

Answer 3

I have worked with two UK ISVs who are doing major redevelopments of their application - virtually start from scratch stuff. Hence the timelines are reasonably long and they have reasonabley good control over the physical schema etc. We discussed at length whether to use L2S or L2E - and went with L2E even though in v1 it is far from perfect. They are having issues but are working through them and overall are happy with the decision.

My one line answer on L2E would be "yes you can build it, yes you will probably get frustrated along the way"

Answer 4

I've got an internal corporate application that's just about ready for prod. EF does have it's shortcomings. But it keeps devs out of the SQL world which is worth the price of admission. I'm generalizing here but you get the picture.

Answer 5

After playing for a couple of days I would not use it in an application where I don't have the freedom to experiment. There are features missing (coming in v2 they say).

BTW what do you mean by "bonuses over LINQ". LINQ is a language feature and it can be used with Entity Framework. If you mean LINQ to SQL there are some benefits however there are some shortcomings.

While this opinion may seem negative I'd like to point out that EF seems to have more potential than other ORM frameworks and I think that given time it will grow to be the best ORM out there so investing time in it seems the right thing to do.