What is the state of ado.net entity framework?

Question

I get the impression that Microsoft is putting a significat investment into this framework, conversely I have heard the who's who (who?) of the object relational professionals think it sucks, and I have to agree. I have asked a simple question a while ago and I do not think it is unsolvable, given the commonality of that problem it should not be that hard to solve.

Should I stick with this thing and give it a chance or should i capitulate and switch to Nhibernate before Microsoft cuts off and discontinues entity framework itself?

I havnt been in the industry long so I havnt experienced wasting time learning a crappy framework to see the framework get discontinued, but if there ever was a first time this may be it. Anyone who witnessed the discontinuation phenomenon care to speculate where this thing is heading?

Answer 1

Entity framework, as it is now, has a lot to be desired. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort towards EF 4.0, though, and really addressing many of its shortcomings. I think EF will be around for quite a while, but unfortunately, I think the current offering is not worth spending a lot of time investing in. If you want to work on EF, wait until 4.0.

That being said, there are many good, mature options out there outside of Microsoft. NHibernate is great if you're looking to support a legacy system. If you're looking to new development, Subsonic and Lightspeed are tough to beat.

Answer 2

The current 1.0 release is an OK attempt - but still leaves a lot to be desired - and Microsoft is well aware of that.

The next version, EF v4 (to be released with the .NET 4.0 wave of releases; promised by Microsoft to be generally available before the end of 2009) will bring a lot of improvements in areas such as :

• support for your own POCO classes (plain old CLR objects) and persistence ignorance
• support for self-tracking POCO classes
• ability to do model-first development
• configurable support for lazy loading
• a lot of improvement in a "code-only scenario"
• improvements in the way foreign key relationships are handled

So while today's EF definitely has its warts and limitations, the amount of improvements for the EF4 time frame look very promising.

So hold your breath for the EF4 release and give it another try once it's available! I'm pretty sure you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Marc