More thoughts about ADO.Net Entity Framework
time to read 2 min | 328 words

After reading the documentation, I have some unanswered questions about Linq For Entities, Microsoft new OR/M framework and I'm concerned about its usability in real life.

More spesifically, I'm concerened about the following:

  • Many to many relations. I have not seen a single mention of them in the documentation, and I know that DLinq doesn't support them.
  • Support for indexed collections (IList<T>) and maps (IDictionary<TKey,TVal>). Again, no mention of those in the documentation, and again, I'm pretty sure (but not completely) that DLinq doesn't support it.
  • Support for custom collections. I'm currently working on a project where just about everything is bound in time. This mean that the collection has to be aware of this. I don't see how I can achieve the same goal using Linq for Entities*.
  • How can I add a new type to the system? I have a column that in the model is boolean, but in the DB is null/not null (don't ask). How do I make map this?

To be presice, I want to know what the extention model is. There is no way that Linq for Entities can cover all the scenarios, and I have a wildly different experiances from Microsoft with regard to extention possibilities. Hell, just yesterday I learned that they decide that batching is too scary to let me handle it unless I'm going through data adapters. And I won't mention the pain that working with ASP.Net Cache is.

The really sad part is that they likely won't make those classes public ever, since they would consider this a breaking change.

*Someone please find a abbrevation for this monster.

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