wagnerblog.com

We’ve collected great feedback from you in these early releases, the most significant being that we need better tools to aid in defining a data model and mapping that model to the database. Although we have tools for generating a direct mapping to the storage schema, the real power of the ADO.NET Entity Framework comes in its ability to flexibly map a variety of relational schema representations to a more appropriate conceptual application model. This has reinforced the need to have a graphical designer experience available for the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

No kidding! The quote comes form Mike Pizzo, an Architect with the ADO Group.

I keep saying it again and again and again that LINQ at the moment is over-hyped and completely pwnd (wow I never use that term) by LLBLGen, which coincidentally has had the kind of tool mentioned in this announcement for oh…. about 4 years now I think. In software development terms thats a really really long time….. a period of time that allows a product to get all the kinks out and mature.

You may ask why I keep coming back to the same subject when discussing the MS Entity Framework. Simple, unless there are some notes on the Internet by people who’ve been there and done that (i.e. executed successful projects with ORM tools outside the MS realm) I am concerned that there will be a huge shadow cast by the MS marketing machine along with all of its evangelism extensions. And yes there is also some self interest to this post, I freely admit it. Have you ever tried to convince a CIO or project executive to use a competing technology when something, on the surface, similar is available from MS? Thats tough. Although it has gotten a little bit easier in the past 5 years, as a result of the many successful .NET open source projects out there.

Maybe, considering that Pizzo pegs the release date of the Entity Framework tools at Q1 2008, maybe there is enough time to improve this technology? I don’t know. Seems to me that using pseudo SQL expressions embedded in OO code is not the way to go.

As Rod Paddock points out, this is similar to something that FoxPro has been doing for over ten years.

My guess is that similarly to the whole MS data-binding strategy, which practically screams for 2 tier development in which you bind controls directly to datasets or datatables, the current implementation of LINQ and its expression style is the result of a decision to look for ways that allow the majority of developers to adopt this technology based on something most are already familiar with – some sort of pseudo SQL.

There has got to be a better way.

As so many people have already said in the past couple of years – where is the innovation and leadership at MS? Seems that there are more than a couple projects under way that look a lot like “ we can do this too “ – but unfortunately don’t really push the envelope and innovate.

Is there more to it than that? I don’t know. Since I don’t work directly with these various teams I don’t know their difficulties and constraints. And I don’t want to sound unfair. Maybe its just the fact that I’ve been beating this same drum for over 4 years and now that some of my convictions look to be validated I would love to see them do a better job of it.

I’m just half kidding here when I say that there is probably a good chance MS will release some technology patches that allows developers to build ASP.NET apps similarly to RoR. And chances are that in their implementation they will do something that sort of acts like RoR but may miss the big picture of it. After all, anyone can spew out a bunch of generated code. Heck, I keep telling friends that RoR is nice but I can be equally or more productive with a certain .NET toolset.

So on the one hand I am happy that someone over there is seeing the light, but on the other hand I am concerned about the implementation of it.

Read more…..

UPDATE: By sheer coincidence I saw that Frans has a post regarding the same link. He speculates about the reasons why the Entity Framework was removed from NET 3.5 / Orcas. Interesting.