Entity Framework

A group of developers have expressed their lack of confidence in Microsoft's upcoming Entity Framework. If you agree with their statements, you can sign the Vote Of No Confidence document here. The document lists some of the biggest problems of the Entity Framework (according to a certain group of developers) so whether you plan to sign it or not, it's definitely an interesting read that's worth checking out.

Looks like everyone is joining the Entity Framework discussion... So, here are a few more interesting links:

More Entity Framework Thoughts Entity Framework: Our Albatross EF Long Term Plans On Comparing Current Tools to Futureware

Definitely worth reading if you're considering using Entity Framework on real projects.

I was gonna post these links in my weekly links overview, but since these are all related i figured it deserved it's own post. It starts off with Danny Simmons (of the Entity Framework development team) comparing Entity Framework with some other data access technologies and explaining why he thinks you should use it. Rob Eisenberg has a short post detailing his thoughts on why you shouldn't use Entity Framework. Ayende's post doesn't really comment on Danny's post, but he does highlight a major source control issue with Entity Framework which should make anyone who's thinking about using Entity Framework in a team environment think twice. And finally, Jeremy Miller comments on Danny's post by mentioning another big downside of the Entity Framework.

Oh and did you know it won't support lazy loading out of the box? Yes, really. Yes, this is the year 2008. No, no lazy loading. Which means that any code using your business objects is going to be littered with statements to check for empty collections/references and dealing with that. Yikes... Let's hope the next version comes out before the next version of Visual Studio