Tim Mallalieu's Blog.

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Tim,

"People should just be intentional and not try to use the EF as a wonder hammer to hit all potential projects. As with any other technology, it should be evaluated in the context of the project constraints and attributes."

In the field, many Microsoft customers don't evaluate technology in any context other than whether or not it is a Microsoft product.  Because most Microsoft products have an implicit prescriptive approach and school of development, many Microsoft customers are not even aware of the arbitrary nature of the approach they are using.

EF will drive ORM to a level of adoption in the Microsoft community that it already has in other communities.  It will do so not because it is the best solution based on context and schools of development, but because it has the Microsoft logo.

I believe, as I mentioned to Danny last week, that it is incumbent upon you and the EF team to begin work diligently to dismantle the hysteria that will drive Microsoft customers to EF by default rather than to a consideration of ORM and a further assessment of the breadth considerations that inform a decision on which framework to use, and the opportunities that each inherently opens a development organization to.

Just saying that it's necessary to assess the appropriate tools doesn't necessarily make it happen.  There is tremendous momentum built up in the Microsoft customer community fed by a decade-old predisposition to fear, uncertainty, and doubt that first needs to be overcome.

You and the team are in a unique position here to bring some rationality to customers' deliberations as they assess ORM and its approaches and schools.

Your words are spot-on, and I'm hoping that they will be bolstered with actions that help ease the context that keeps them from being put into tangible and meaningful practice in the Microsoft customer community.

@Tim,

I have not used EF and have only a passing familiarity with NHibernate. I am not heavily invested in the outcome of this debate. I am, however, invested in the debate itself, since how Microsoft responds to feedback from the community directly affects me.

The signatories to the vote of no confidence have specific things that they care about that they believe make EF inadequate for use in V1. It is not just a matter of EF being less complete than NHibernate; the vote of no confidence is basically saying that EF is not ready to be used in production applications, because of its lack of key features.

Your response, and the general response of the EF team, is that EF V1 is not targeting people like Scott and Jeremy and the values that they believe are important; but rather, it is targeting a different group of people, trying to solve a different class of problems using different core values. I can understand that; as a developer I have had to make that same decision many times. You can't do everything you would like to do in the first pass.

What bothers me is that I can't find anything that tells me what EF V1 *is* targeting. If POCO support, lazy loading, behavioral objects, and PI were not the values that you were working from, what values WERE you working from? If people like Scott and Jeremy are not your initial target audience, who is? The signatories to the vote of no confidence believe that EF is not ready to help them solve their problems; what problems is it ready to solve? I think if the EF team could be more transparent about these issues, it would go a long way towards swaying those of us who are "on the fence". Your explanation may not satisfy Scott or Jeremy, but it would help the rest of us understand where you think EF fits in the landscape today.

If this explanation already exists and I have missed it, I apologize, and would it appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.

David