Entity Framework vote of no confidence

As was announced initially (as far as I can tell) on Bil Simser’s blog, some concerned citizens of the .NET world put out an online vote-of-no-confidence concerning the Entity Framework:

• Letter
• List of signatories

Somewhere on the list you’ll find my name.  I agree with the letter, and I encourage you to read the letter and sign if you also agree.  I also have two additional reasons I signed:

• I got totally hosed by the initial MSDN documentation on data access, when I was getting started on programming
• The overall direction and strategy towards data access hasn’t seemed to change since then

Using DataSets and typed DataSets, complete with all my logic inside stored procedures, seemed bad, but I didn’t know any better.  Why should I?  The articles from the folks who created the framework described in great detail the correct way to use their framework.

But people who write articles aren’t always the same as the people who develop real-world applications.  Now, I don’t pretend to know how the design process works, they can’t be completely in a vacuum, but I’m not sure how much opportunity people developing frameworks get to build applications built on top of those frameworks.

When you don’t live in the house you built, you have to rely on the current inhabitants to tell you the house works.  Unless said inhabitants have only known houses where the toilet sits inside the kitchen, they’ll probably ask for a closer fridge.

There have already been quite a few reactions from bloggers (thank you Google):

• http://www.unwindsoftware.com/blog/2008/06/adonet-entity-framework-vote-of-no.html
• http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/bellis/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=5713bd5d-0090-40e9-a6c4-c117651476f2&ID=30
• http://blogs.vertigo.com/personal/timlee/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=12
• http://stevenharman.net/blog/archive/2008/06/23/entity-framework-vote-of-no-confidence.aspx
• http://devlicio.us/blogs/casey/archive/2008/06/24/ado-net-entity-framework-vote-of-no-confidence.aspx
• http://neverindoubtnet.blogspot.com/2008/06/rejoinder-1-to-of-no-confidence-in.html

One article:

• http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1457

A thread, the original announcement:

• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/altdotnet/message/10564

Some MS responses:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/timmall/archive/2008/06/24/vote-of-no-confidence.aspx
• An EF design blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/

The goal of this letter is to inform customers, as well as create more dialog.  I believe this letter will be successful on both points.