Yesterday, as I was pondering the internals of the XAF model for my ongoing localization project, I received an email from the Microsoft Community Leaders mailing list informing me that the Entity Framework will ship as part of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 later this year. Now - as you ponder which is the more disturbing part of that sentence, the fact that I’m a community leader in Scotland or the fact that the Entity Framework is soon to be released into the wild – let me tell you that, around the same time as I received that email, I was listening to a podcast where a group of well known developers were discussing the Entity Framework.
Whilst discussing it’s short comings, those developers were traveling a well worn path. Those of us with an interest in the ORM tool space (and hopefully that is everyone reading this blog) are well aware of the areas in which this first release version of the Entity Framework will fall short, namely: focusing on the data aspects of the entity at the expense of the behavioral aspects; the excess code developers will have to write in order to cope with the poor decisions taken by the team around the lazy loading of associated entities; the Entity Framework’s view of a shared model which flies in the face of best practice and other such failings that we need not dredge up here.
However, the most interesting point made in the podcast and the one I am echoing here in this blog post, was that the release of the Entity Framework this summer is to be broadly welcomed amongst vendors and consumers of ORM tools. Why is that you ask, when the framework falls so obviously short of the required mark? Well it is a sad fact of life that many companies and many individual developers too for that matter, will not contemplate looking at a new architectural paradigm until such time as it appears on the Microsoft development stack. Whist there are those of us who are happy to inhabit the world of XPO, NHibernate and other ORM tools, it remains a sad fact that we, ladies and gentlemen, are very much in the minority.
With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 this summer, that is all about to change, an ORM tool (albeit a flawed one) will then become a first class citizen in the Microsoft development stack. That fact will open up the world of ORM to many more people, and as those people explore that new world many will drift to XPO and other ORM tools, making 2009, in my opinion, a great year to be in the ORM space. We think XPO is a great ORM tool and we look forward to welcoming all the new users that the Entity Framework will introduce us to.