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IUpdateable from Eric Nelson

Head in the Clouds, feet firmly in the .NET Framework

<< Slides and links from my Qcon London talk on Entity Framework | Home | LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities (Entity Framework) performance comparison >>

Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…

In the UK we have something called marmite. A strange tasting thing that apparently you spread on bread and can actually eat. No, seriously you can actually eat it. As you can tell – I hate marmite. The smell, the look but most of all the taste. Disgusting!

However there are people (I have met them) who love marmite. Interestingly, there are zero people who fall between these two opposing views – you either love it or hate it.

Which brings me to the ADO.NET Entity Framework. On twitter I keep seeing tweets in these two camps – people either loving it or hating it. Two great examples:

Now I suspect the reality lies somewhere in between.If you have a moment – take this poll and see what your peers think of it. Thanks.

Monday, March 16, 2009 2:35 PM

Your Comments.

# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
The EF runtime seems to be quite solid and satisfy the requriements of my current project (a fairly large enterprise app). It's not the perfect soltuion, but gets the job done quite well.
However, the EF Designer in VS needs LOTS of work.
We spend quite a bit of time in the .edmx itself. Good thing the schema isn't too complicated.

Left by Aaron at 3/16/2009 2:59 PM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
You need another simple option: "I use Nhibernate"

Left by Travis at 3/16/2009 4:13 PM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
I did consider adding something like "I prefer a different ORM" - but decided to stick with a view on EF as a useful tool (or not). I am expecting a bunch of ALT.NET folks (gross generalization on my part) to vote "dislike" but I am curious about how many folks are getting stuff done with it and finding it (at least) ok :-)

Left by Eric at 3/16/2009 4:45 PM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
I have not used the ADO.NET Entity Framework yet, however it must be better then hand written stored procs and (drag+drop) DataAdaptors. However given that the people I trust in the TDD community says Nhibernate is a lot better, I would rather spend my time learning Nhibernate.

One of the problem I have with ADO.NET Entity Framework, is it comes from the same people that said you should use stored procs for all data access, and that “drag&drag” data binding is a good way of writing software. I have been to enough MSDN road shows over the year, not to trust the demos I see….

If I were offered a job using the ADO.NET Entity Framework, I would take it over a job using DataAdaptors, however I would rather take a job working with people that are skilful users of Nhibernate/TDD.

Left by Ian Ringrose at 3/17/2009 9:43 AM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
Hi Rik - sorry you have found an issue with the poll. I use zoho to host the poll, so I have no control over it.

Ian - a few things about nhibernate vs EF. nhiberante ticks a lot of ORM feature boxes which is why is so popular. More than EF v1 does as an ORM. But EF v2 will add a lot of ORM features that were missing in v1. However - what that misses is EF is more than an ORM - the intention is to offer a conceptual model to a db which can be consumed from a variety of clients - e.g. a reporting tool that needs no ORM capabilities but would like rich query over an abstracted model. However where Nhibernate scores great is it does not require 3.5 SP1 of the .NET Framework. Point taken on "demoware" from MS. We have had too much of that. The ED designer is an example - it demos well but is clunky for a large system.

Left by Eric at 3/17/2009 2:54 PM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
Hi Rik, thanks for responding to my comment, however I don't understand

"conceptual model to a db which can be consumed from a variety of clients - e.g. a reporting tool that needs no ORM capabilities but would like rich query over an abstracted model."

Every product I have worked on that had a requirement for reporting has (sooner or later) needed to include data in the reports that is not directly in the database. (Often the value of a calculated property from the object model)

As I don’t wish to repeat the logic from my application code in my reports, the reports had to be drive from a DataSet that is created based on the C# object model. So what value is there in a reporting tool being able to understand the “shape” of the object model, but not call methods on the C# object model?

The only time I have seen of the self reporting tools be of value is when the application implements ODBC or OLDB over it’s object model.

Left by Ian Ringrose at 3/17/2009 3:35 PM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
The conceptual model in EF v2 will allow user defined functions to be added which can be expressed in ESQL and be exposed to consumer of the conceptual model - which sounds like it goes someway to doing what you want. However Reporting Services also allows this sort of stuff today even when going against a physical store and will still have it against a conceptual. But won't it be nice to report against an entity called customer rather than 15 tables in the db that together make up a customer :-)

Left by Eric at 3/17/2009 10:46 PM
# re: Entity Framework v1 – the marmite of ORMs? A quick poll…
It has potential and will be good but still has a long way to go before it is a finished product.

Left by William McAinsh at 3/25/2009 12:11 PM

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