8.6. EFv1 Criticisms

ORM frameworks are a subject many people feel strongly about, and EF received a huge amount of criticism when it was first released. A number of developers even set up a petition web site called ADO.NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence to highlight to Microsoft their concerns about EF's design. The criticisms are well worth a read and can still be viewed at http://efvote.wufoo.com/forms/ado-net-entity-framework-vote-of-no-confidence.

The main criticisms most have of EFv1 are that

• EF is too focused on the data aspects of an ORM framework and neglects other areas—for example, validation and transactions.

• EF lacks support for persistence ignorance (EF is too tightly coupled to the underlying data store).

• EF has too many dependencies and lacks the ability to create entities as standard .NET classes (you will hear these referred to as POCOs [plain-old CLR objects]).

• EF lacks support for lazy loading.

• The methods for adding domain logic to entities are difficult/unsatisfactory (currently this has to be carried out by creating partial classes).

• The EDM is held in a single file, which creates a bottleneck for source control in multiuser environments.

• EF has immature tools, which sometimes mangle model files or will not open when customizations to raw models are made.

While there are workarounds to some of these issues, such as lazy loading and persistence ignorance, it was evident that these areas would need to be addressed for EF to gain the acceptance Microsoft hoped for.