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ADO.NET and the database
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The Ado.Net Entity Framework v2, are we there yet?
At Nagarro, we are always looking to stay tuned into upcoming technology (of all types - gadgets to frameworks); and the current flavor is of course Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4. We have been trying out the beta and the earlier preview versions of VS2010, however, that is not the topic of this post.
Recently, we had the opportunity to give our opinion on the latest avatar of the Ado.Net Entity Framework to Jeffrey Schwartz from Application Development Trends magazine. Jeff was kind enough to publish our opinions in an article on the Visual Studio Magazine (thank you Jeff). The article is titled “Will Entity Framework 2 appease early adopters of LINQ to SQL?“. We, as can be deduced, were early adopters of LINQ (to SQL and others).
If you would like to see that question answered, I urge you to go and read that article. In this article, I wanted to discuss a little bit more about how we look at Entity Framework v2.
When Microsoft first announced the Ado.Net Entity Framework, we were unsure about what to do with it. We had already started training our developers on LINQ to SQL, and some of our projects were already using the technology. We found it (L2S) to be a very good way to implement the ORM layer of an application (and that worked very well in most cases). Additionally, we weren’t sure how mature the framework was. Sure, it looked perfect for some of our larger projects, but somehow it wasn’t fitting the bill (and we were not alone). And compared to LINQ to SQL, it felt quite lackluster in features.
The new version of the Entity Framework looks much better. It almost feels as if Microsoft went out of their way to ensure that Ado.Net EFv2 can stand on its own when compared to LINQ to SQL. However, by this time, we are pretty invested in LINQ to SQL, so there is no question of moving any of our existing projects over. But, we are very keen to try out the EFv2 in newer projects and internal applications. Specifically, we will looking at integrating it the next version of our Nagarro .Net Application Framework (which is a base framework that we use for most of our projects).
“Are we there yet?” - I would say, almost. The latest version of the Entity Framework looks a much more complete product as compared to the earlier version. Some of the features from an implementation-as-a-tool-in-a-software-development-services-shop perspective are really great:
POCO support - the support for persistence ignorant objects make a great deal of difference because we can continue to leverage the features of the Entity Framework while using your own custom data layer logic alongside it. This is beneficial because this means we can at least consider using the EF in existing applications where the data model and the layers are already defined.
First class code generation - this will come as a relief to most developers. The code generation engine, T4, is much more versatile that what we used to have earlier. This means that each application development team can customize the code generation a little bit according to their specific needs.
And of course there are hosts of improvements in general and there are tons of articles covering those.
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