Last fall, I presented a 3 hour workshop at DevConnections, comparing and contrasting ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework’s LINQ to Entities, Object Services and EntityClient as well as comparing LINQ to Entities to Entity SQL, then providing recommendations for when one makes sense over the others in various scenarios. It was a really fun session to present.

It was a little daunting to pull together, though, because even Microsoft hadn’t provided this guidance at that point beyond “LINQ to SQL is for RAD and EF is for the Enterprise”. There were a few great forum comments by Mike Pizzo which were helpful.

Coincidentally, (definitely coincidence, I’m not trying to suggest otherwise) Diego Vega, a PM on the EF team, wrote a great post on the the API part of the topic three days after I did the session. And then followed it up in December with a post about LINQ to Entities vs Entity SQL. I laughed that it was in response to a question by John Papa and emailed John to say “geeze, man, you were at the conference, and you were a speaker. You could have come to my workshop for free!” John had presented two great intro sessions on Entity Framework as part of the Data Access track.

So, I am presenting this as a shorter talk at Vermont.NET tomorrow night. We’ll see how short. I may just have someone lock the doors when I get started. 🙂

I’ll be doing this session again in May at DevTeach and June at TEchEd. I expect it to evolve by June.

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