ADO.NET EF v LINQ to SQL
So with the recent news of LINQ to SQL going DOA a lot of those who have developed applications around it are probably hurting. I myself was shocked to hear that Microsoft would do such a foolish thing.
This is one of the things that turns off people from using .NET and other Microsoft technologies. Things like branding, constant change and constant name changing steers people away from using something new. When people first come to the .NET Framework one of the features they may be looking for is LINQ to SQL because it has the most community backing right now. Little do they know that the technology that pulled them in is now going away for something harder to use and with less community backing.
I think Microsoft has been doing a fantastic job lately with their developer technologies with things like ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, MEF and Dynamic Data all being openly developed on Codeplex and even including open source JavaScript library jQuery. However, this has got to stop.
What they need to do is make LINQ to SQL make the base access library/framework for a data layer to data objects and make ADO.NET EF (named something else hopefully) the enterprise solution and extensions of LINQ to SQL. Rather than creating parallel, redundant frameworks they could break apart functionality. Making one framework better and one extending the other.
Microsoft, please don’t make the mistake you’ve done so many times in the past you’re finally on the right track – don’t screw it up now.
