I was wondering what people thought about the decision to support Entity Framework over LINQ-to-SQL? I have an application I'm developing originally in LINQ-to-SQL. I found it the perfect solution for our application.
While attempting to port to Entity Framework I was surprised how rough it was. IMHO, not even close to being ready for prime time. No lazy loading, no POCOs, horrible dependency on inheritance. I found it largely unusable in my case and instead decided to stick with LINQ-to-SQL until somehow this Entity Framework can get more polished.
Anyone else have similar experience with it?
That is pretty much my view. See my previous reply here. This other question wasn't specifically about the problems in EF, but yes: it has a fair few glitches. For example (in addition to your existing options):
- no support for
Expression.Invoke (re-using expression trees to form a more complex expression)
- no support for table-UDFs, which can be used to create well-defined, callable methods in the database that are still composable with sort/skip/take etc
LINQ-to-SQL handles both just fine...
I think it depends on the application platform. When my team set out to create a new ASP.net app, we wanted to go with EF... but after playing around with it for a bit, we went with Linq-To-SQL. In a web environment, managing the L2S datacontext was a lot easier. Also, we liked that L2S entities expose the original Id field (e.g. EmployeeTypeId), unlike EF, which would only have the child entity exposed. In a web environment, a lot of times you really don't need that extra information, the Id is enough because it is a reference to a dropdown list that has already been loaded (and probably cached).
L2S is more mature for what it is made for.
And I will still consider EF as a BETA realease.
there is lot of discussion around EF, you can find alot more in related questions.
I've heard that L2S is quickly going the way of the dodo. There is a little bit of chatter about a move to opensource - but the ADO.NET group at Microsoft is planning to push all their efforts towards EF...
Sad too, because I find Linq2SQL extremely easy to work with and the thought of porting all my code makes me a little sick.
Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap
I agree. There are too many bugs and design flaws in Entity Framework v1 (the .net 3.5 SP1 version) to make it usable in real-world development. EFv4 looks more promising though...
