Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010

8.16. Dane Morgridge

http://geekswithblogs.NET/danemorgridge

I have been using ORM tools for several years and decided to take a look at EF when it was released with .NET 3.5 SP1. Previously, I had been using LINQ to SQL, and given their similarities, moving to EF wasn't difficult. The first version of EF was missing quite a few features that were present in most ORM tools, mainly lazy loading. I tend to personally prefer to preload as much data as I can, so not having lazy loading wasn't a huge problem for me. One of the biggest problems I ran into was the fact that you didn't have direct easy access to foreign keys, which required you to pull back additional data to get basic relationship data. Other than a few API differences, this was the ...