Entity Framework 4 (EF4) Adventures

Intro

I've been recently working on a smart client (WinForms) application backed by Entitiy Framework 4 (EF4) on Visual Studio 2010. In this blog post I will try to give you some tips regarding some limitations and points to be careful about EF4.

Why Entity Framework (EF)?

Through my .NET development career I've used couple of ORM frameworks like NHibernate, LLBLGen and Subsonic. Each framework has some sort of unique approach to ORM. My favourite ORM was, and actually still is, NHibernate. I like the open source nature of NH and the community of NH is very active. LLBLGen was my second popular ORM because the tooling was inplace and entity mappings could be handled easly. Subsonic was minimalist and it was really a joy to develop with Subsonic. But each of these ORM frameworks made me crazy from time to time. To name few of them; configuring NHibernate is really a pain although they have some addins, LLBLGen has some sort of too imperative query constructs and Subsonic is minimalist and sometimes does not fit well while implementing some not so important part (classic %20 part) of a system. Oh I've forgot to mention LinqToSql which was the first shot of Microsoft in the ORM area. I've also used LinqToSql. 

Since EF was first announced I've been watching the progress and keep an eye on the experience of people using early EF versions. My first impression was; stay away until next major release. And that major release seems to be EF4. My answer to the question why EF is

• EF4 comes as part of  .NET Framework 4. No extra installation needed
• EF4 is fully integrated with Visual Studio 2010
• EF4 Model Designer, incorperated in VS 2010 is nearly fantastic
• With EF4 you can persist POCO's to supported databases easly
• With EF4 you can generate your entities from your database schema
• Complex Types are fancy
• Function exports (stored procedure support) just work like a charm. Paired with complex types this introduces a real power for brown field projects

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