John Papa posted a nice introduction to Entity Framework. If you're new to Entity Framework (like me) then it's definitely a good read.
One thing i already dislike about EF is that it uses 3 kind of mapping files:
- Conceptual Schema Definition Language (CSDL) to define your domain entities
- Store Schema Definition Language (SSDL) to define your database tables
- Mapping Schema Language which contains the actual mappings between the domain entities and the database structure
This really seems excessive. With NHibernate, all of this information is stored in one mapping layer. You might argue that it is conceptually cleaner to split up all of this information, but for now it seems rather impractical to me.
I hope they change this before the final version is released.
Other than the mappings, it looks pretty nice. And they already announced that the final version will support Persistance Independence so it should get even better 