ADO.NET Orcas Future Directions 8
Also see part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of this series of posts on the next-generation data access for the .NET platform. Please note that this information is subject to change.
Fabrice Marguerie points to the product availability for Orcas.
Scott Bellware is falling back to NHibernate for the time being. Apparently he phoned with Dan Simmons and Tim Mallalieu and received confirmation that the EDM designer will be not ship with the Orcas RTM.
Kevin Hoffman has a great Entity Framework tutorial online to work your way around the bugs in Orcas beta 1.
Dmitri Zimin mentions the competition between LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework during the deep dive training at Redmond.
No support for multiple data sources. According to Daniel Simmons this features breaks the fundamental principle that query processing is executed in the database, not on the client. I can’t let go of the thought of distributed queries ;) (discussion)
According to Daniel Dosen support for “using” in the CSDL schema is currently under evaluation by the team (discussion). This will lessen the requirement to store the complete domain model within a single assembly.
Daniel Simmons comments on support for spans in a future release. This is implemented as a Span property of ObjectQuery<T> (discussion).
Pablo Castro explains once again the choice for explicit lazy loading (discussion). Although I agree with Pablo’s reasoning I would rather choose a specific scenario according to the needs of my application.
Daniel Simmons acknowledges, in the long-term, data manipulation language (DML) support for Entity SQL (discussion).