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Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

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Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#11
post #3

Despite my usual complaints about Microsoft, I really appreciate the direction they've been heading with their adoption of open source for a growing number of their products. ScottGu, Hanselman et al. really deserve a lot of credit for the big cultural changes they've caused to allow a lot of this.

Indeed, it's also great to see that they are starting to use more widely accepted open source licenses, which as the Apache License (as was also the case with ASP.NET MVC).

Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#12

Its hard for me to say this in some ways, but of the bigcos, I'm most bullish on Microsoft. I might actually go stand in line (if there are any) for the Surface tablet and maybe even a Windows Phone 8 device. They are (finally) making the right moves and doing it in a consistent and open way. Any Microsoft insiders know who is driving all this change? ScottGu? Steven Sinofsky?

If anything I'd bet that the 'fiefdoms' have quit warring as much?

Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#13

Is Entity used a lot? We looked at using it but it seemed to be inferior to NHibernate (don't remember details, think there was a problem with type error detection and other stuff).

The company I work for uses it, I'm not thrilled - it's still rough around the edges and I'm used to writing my own SQL, but it gets the job done on the few projects I've used it (I only used V1 which was very bad).

Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#14
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like it, and we don't use it at Fog Creek, but, yes, it's VERY heavily used on piles of projects I know. It's not as efficient or flexible as NHibernate, but it's far easier and vastly better integrated into Visual Studio, making it a bit of a no-brainer for simple persistence needs.

So, what do you guys use at Fog Creek. I've been discussing with my colleagues some of the micro-ORMs like Dapper, Massive, or PetaPoco as an alternative to EF. http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ https://github.com/robconery/massive http://www.toptensoftware.com/petapoco/

Kiln uses LINQ to SQL and Dapper, for the same reasons StackOverflow does: the combination combines speed with flexibility. We expect to ditch one or both in the medium future (we want to support more than just SQL Server), but it's a good fit for the moment.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#16

Is Entity used a lot? We looked at using it but it seemed to be inferior to NHibernate (don't remember details, think there was a problem with type error detection and other stuff).

I've used it on a few projects. I have never used NHibernate, so I can't really compare them, but I really like EF. I don't have a great deal of SQL experience, so I'm much better at writing queries with LINQ methods and prefer it over SQL. It's great having strongly typed entities and the intellisense is awesome, but that's probably true with any ORM.

Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#19
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what do you guys use at Fog Creek. I've been discussing with my colleagues some of the micro-ORMs like Dapper, Massive, or PetaPoco as an alternative to EF. http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ https://github.com/robconery/massive http://www.toptensoftware.com/petapoco/

I don't know what they use at Fog Creek, but I will say that I've been building a lot of things lately in both Massive and PetaPoco, and I've really enjoyed it. I've done several projects in both Linq2SQL and EntityFramework at this point, and they both seem way too 'heavy.' Writing straight sql (or pretty much straight sql) has been a return to simplicity. it's forced me to make sure my queries are efficient, and on…

Been having a lot of success with Massive myself. How's using PetaPoco? Any frustrating gotchas?

Re: Microsoft Open Sources their Entity Framework ORM

#20
post #15

Interesting that they put this in a Git repo (instead of TFS), but only to then push it to CodePlex (instead of Github)

I don't have any proof to provide (and if I did, it would all be anecdotal) but I've heard rumours that Microsoft are planning on breathing life into codeplex and have an exciting/significant set of changes in the pipeline (which should improve on some of the things that make using DVCS painful).

Considering Team Foundation Service, project Kudu/Git deploy on Azure etc. it makes sense to think that Microsoft are making a play to seriously take on GitHub and Atlassian, so that they're the one provider that owns an entire software ecosystem, end to end.

Either way, I don't think that the EF team would have had a choice on where to host it...

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