Do not assume that your users are starting from scratch
time to read 2 min | 309 words

I was pointed at Julie Lerman's blog, Sorting out LINQ and Entity Framework for Data Access. This statement caught my eye:

...in the end, we can write our data access code against this schema (which creates classes for us) rather than having to code up connections to the db, create complex joins to pull together info from various related tables and write lots of update logic...

Why do you assume that we are doing it in the first place? This is supposed to be one of the two main advantages of Linq for Entities, the other being not being bound 1:1 to the database schema. If this is the target audiance for Linq for Entities, the people who are hand coding their DAL, then Microsoft has a problem.

About three to four years ago, it would have welcomed with open arms, but the standard about usable OR/M has changed since Microsoft announced and killed Object Spaces, and I get the sense that Microsoft isn't looking at what other Object Relation Mappers (both in .Net and elsewhere) are doing.

And to another point:

We are working with 6 new query languages (though they are all related),5 new ways of accessing data, trying to keep track of which syntax goes with which access method and which access method returns what type of data.

No further comment is neccesary, I believe.

Update: Removed wrong attribution.

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