Sheesh people are being pretty freaking harsh. Has anyone actually tried using EF yet?

@PeterRitchie, you managed to misspell Bouma twice, despite the fact that it's part of the URL and clearly printed in the title of the blog.

@aquinas: Frans doesn't stray from controversy (see the legendary post "Stored Procedures are bad, mkay?" http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2003/11/18/38178.aspx ), but most of the blogs kicked to the front page so far haven't been that harsh. They're pretty well-reasoned and rational objections to the EF, mostly from people who have written their own ORM and don't agree with what Microsoft has done. Reading these objections is good, but as you pointed out, there's a lot of academic theory being discussed, and very little talk about real world factors like maintainability and implementation effort. If someone can smack those shovels in the face of EF effectively to the implementors on sites like DNK, EF is in trouble. Until then, enjoy the warmth of the flames ;)

Give Frans some credit, he makes a lot of good points in there. As far as maintainability I think we ORM makers have already solved that issue including LLBLGen, I know Frans has created his one LINQ provider and also can generate the LLBLGen architecture. As for our architecture, EntitySpaces, we have added LINQ to SQL support to load our Entities and we generate from the database schema in seconds (modeling comes later). Therefore, you can do full LINQ queries with EntitySpaces and we have NO XML files to mess with or maintain such as the EF does, and we use zero reflection, run on mono, the compact framework, medium trust and so on. To us the ADO EF is just another competitor, sure many will use it, however the market is big and there is room for many. We are not sitting around wondering what the EF is doing, we are moving foward just as we always have. We absorbed LINQ and we are moving on, nuff said.

http://www.entityspaces.net/blog/2008/05/11/EntitySpaces+2008+LINQ+To+SQL+In+Next+Beta.aspx

http://www.entityspaces.net/blog/2008/05/11/EntitySpaces+2008+LINQ+To+SQL+In+Next+Beta+Part+2.aspx

The interesting thing will be to see if Microsoft "accidentally" removes the feature that allows us to leverage LINQ in this way, which is a real possibility. They pulled the ability to return a DataTable from a LINQ query in one of the beta's (hmmm?). The question is now will they track down how we are doing it and eliminate it as well.

oops, that was meant to be "his own" not "his one"