Entity Framework

So there's been a lot of commenting back and forth at the moment concerning the new Microsoft Entity Framework and especially the "vote of no confidence" by members of the Alt.Net and DDD communities. This I can understand, the current EF certainly doesn't meet any of their requirements for a toolset or framework.

The EF team looks to have taken some of this criticism on board and the Entity Framework Design blog gives some good indications we could end up with an excellent toolset.

The bastard step child in all of this is LINQ to SQL, certainly all the attention is on EF and as Ian Cooper says "I would like to see a commitment from the Data Platform team to stop its focus on talking LINQ to SQL down as a RAD tool and tallking up its advantages for use in the OO approaches to software development." I'd like to see this as well. For small to medium projects this could an excellent foundation, I'd love to see it opened up by the Data team, the provider model for it is mostly there, hidden away under internals and sealed classes.

On a personal note, I'm still hunting for a product idea, my brain seems to overly critical at the idea phase. I'm currently working on common libraries for my work and I'll share some of the ideas that come out it soon. I'd like to polish of the LINQ to SQL repositories and building it into a business framework.