There I was sitting patiently at my desk. Drinking coffee (I think) trying to figure out what the next best social networking site was going to be (So I could create it ;) ), when BLAMMM, someone dropped an ORM into my code. OK, ok, fine it did not happen that fast but it sure caught me by surprise when I really started to dig into it, and boy was I impressed!!
For those that don’t have any idea what I am talking about, ORM stands for Object Relational Mapper, and I am specifically talking about the ADO.Net Entity Framework. I had been playing around with LINQ and LINQ to SQL for quite some time and while it could be considered and ORM, it has certain limitations that stop it from being used in and enterprise level application. This is not the case with the ADO.Net Entity Framework. One of the things you have to give up when you use an ORM is a little bit of control over your entities. Weather you are using and ORM that is Attribute-Based, CodeGen-Based, or XML Based (Or a combination of them). You will most likely give control of your entities over to the ORM. This is not the case with the ADO.Net Entity Framework. Of all the ORM’s that I have used, this is far and away the easiest one I have ever worked with. Part of the reason for this, is the fact that it is integrated into Visual Studio (3.5 SP1). I will say that it is still version 1 and that much needed additions are in the works for V2, but I am very excited about its future and will be blogging about my exploits with it in the future.
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