Last night I attended a local user group meeting on then Entity Framework (included in VS 2008 Sp1). The presentation was given by Bruce Johnson of ObjectSharp consulting. I enjoyed the presentation and finished up with the though that this implementation of a ORM solution is more then likely what I will settle on for future development. The defining moment … 3 things for me (1) The SQL generated was very clean and seemed optimized. I have been looking as some NHibernate queries lately and they seem (at least to me) somewhat heavy/ugly. (2) I really like LINQ and the query notations and could not use it directly against the SalesLogix provider (SQLClient only) and since with the Framework the provider/connection string can be provided this limitation has been lifted. I really think this will help bootstrap the development process for me and decrease my time to market . (3) I also quite like the visual designer built into the tool set and it allows the mapping/creation of the context/data objects to be a first class citizen.
I hope to play with this technology more in the future.
– Mark