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

David Sceppa posted a list of companies/organisations that plan to release providers for Entity Framework within 3 months of the final release… Notice how Oracle isn’t on that list? Apparantly there are 2 other companies that will be providing connectivity to Oracle databases, but i do find it kinda weird that Oracle doesn’t seem to support this…

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