Last week I gave a talk at Qcon London entitled

ORM, EDM, ESQL, Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities - confused?

In the session I wanted to make a few points worth summarising here:

• ORM usage by Windows Developers is low compared to other platforms
  • I believe this will change significantly now Microsoft has an offering
• ORM can be very productive but also dangerous
  • I showed a demo which looked at lazy vs eager vs explicit loading vs projection
• Entity Framework is more than an ORM – the ORM bit is just the most visible part
  • Entity Data Model is the core and can be used directly using ESQL
• Microsoft product teams are picking up dependencies on Entity Framework
  • Therefore it is safe for you to do so
• Entity Framework v1 has its problems, especially:
  • In the designer (runtime in general is very good)
  • And for certain ORM approaches – POCO, Model first etc
• Entity Framework v2 will respond to these problems
• Entity Framework v1 can and is being used successfully

Some links:

• Entity Framework documentation
• http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign V2 features

Slides: