Some of the best Entity Framework info is currently living in the MSDN forums.

Mike Pizzo is the Principal Architect on the DP (Data Programmability) team.

Today, Mike wrote a lengthy response to yet another query on “what is the difference between linq to sql and Entity Framework”. At DevConnections in March, I asked 5 different people from Microsoft this question and got 5 different answers. 🙂 A few weeks later, I wrote my own answer in this blog post. The DP team has become much clearer about thsi lately.

Here are some highlights from Mike’s reply:

• LINQ to SQL is targeted more toward rapidly developing applications against your existing Microsoft SQL Server schema, while the Entity Framework provides object- and storage-layer access to Microsoft SQL Server and 3^rd party databases through a loosely coupled, flexible mapping to existing relational schema.
• LINQ to SQL has features targeting “Rapid Development” against a Microsoft SQL Server database.
• The Entity Framework has features targeting “Enterprise Scenarios”. 
• The Entity Framework is more than LINQ to Entities; it includes a “storage layer” that lets you use the same conceptual application model through low-level ADO.NET Data Provider interfaces using Entity SQL, and efficiently stream results as possibly hierarchical/polymorphic DataReaders, saving the overhead of materializing objects for read-only scenarios where there is no additional business logic. 

You can read the entire reply here.

In the same MSDN forum thread that I referred to in my post “Beta2 – Where’s Entity Framework?“, Danny Simmons says (with my emphasis)

Believe me, if there were some way to release it sooner with the level of quality that is needed and including the first CTP of the designer which we have promised will be part of this release, then we most certainly would.

I must have missed the promise in past posts/discussions and had no idea that we were going to get our hands back on the Visual Modeler this soon. While I’m also disappointed not to have the new Entity Framework bits to play with yet, this is really great news!

Dinesh Kulkarni, a PM on the LINQ team, has a nice list of what to look for in LINQ to SQL in the new beta. Read more…

 [A New DevLife post]

Since this spring, the Data Programmability team has been clear that Entity Framework is going to be developed along side of VS2008, but won’t be part of the VS2008 install and that Entity Framework will be released after Visual Studio 2008 releases (during the 1st half of 2008 is the narrowest timeframe we’ve been told so far).

In this April 28th post, Mike Pizzo states:

We will continue to ship CTPs and Betas of the ADO.NET Entity Framework that align with Orcas throughout the remainder of this year.

At the beginning of this month we saw how this works. There was a June CTP of VS2008 and a separate CTP of Entity Framework that had to be installed on top of Visual Studio CTP.

I also know that the Beta2 of Entity Framework will be vastly improved over what we saw in the June CTP, so I am very eager to get my hands on it.

So why is it that when I downloaded Beta2 yesterday and opened it up, I still had this hope, this expectation that Entity Framework would be in there? Why was I so disappointed that it wasn’t? Foolish girl.

Since for some reason, I wasn’t able to log into the forums on my computer, when I finally tried it on a different computer (after two days of being “stuck”), I saw that Danny Simmons clarifies the timing:

Since the Entity Framework is now shipping separately from Orcas, the Orcas beta 2 does not include any Entity Framework bits, and unfortunately the existing CTP will also not work with beta 2.  We will, however, have a beta version of the entity framework sometime in August that will work with beta 2 (and have some additional goodies <grin>).

So I’ll have to just keep a stiff upper lip and entertain myself with some of the many other new toys in VS2008, fiddle with Astoria or maybe even just do some of my client work!

I’ve always been a little confused about where Data Access fits into the bigger picture of organizational structure. Even when I speak at conferences, nobody knows where to put data access talks. Smart Client? Web Development? Architecture? Database? It covers all of these areas. At DevConnections, the Microsoft talks about the Entity Framework were in the SQL Server track. So basically developers weren’t aware of the talks because the SQL Server schedule was on a different chart than the schedule for ASP Connections and VS Connections.

This is happily fixed for November since we have our very own Data Access track!! I’ll write more about that another time, but you can find the talks listed in both the ASP show and the VS show. 🙂

I also never was really clear on where the ADO.NET Team fit into Microsoft. I know they are in the same building as the SQL Server team. But I always think of ADO.NET being more closely tied with Visual Studio since that’s where I do my data access coding.

In this introductory post for the Astoria Team, Mike Flasko clarifies the relationship, even though he just did so in passing. He refers to the Astoria team as:

part of the “Data Programmability” (DP) team within the SQL Server organization at Microsoft

… “within” …

So, SQL Server owns data access. Interesting. I never really realized that. But it makes sense.

I have always referred to anyone working in data access as the ADO.NET team. That’s wrong. There is a team that is specifically for ADO.NET, but that is within DP. So DP encompasses ADO.NET and Astoria. What else? Digging back to the initial post in the Data Programmability blog (blogs.msdn.com/data), Sam Drucker describes the umbrella of the DP team. Note that this was before Astoria and Jasper so they go under there as well, though Jasper is still an incubator project, not a product.

Sam said (back in June 2006). The highlights are my own so I can count the list.

We have a lot of technologies under our umbrella and no matter what part of the Windows platform you use we’ve got you covered. The team has been building solutions for data programmability for many years, from the early formation of ODBC, the advances of OLEDB, core XML processing support with MSXML, ADO with Visual Basic, TDS and SOAP access to SQL Server, JDBC connectivity, working with Visual Studio on XML editing, XSLT debugging, and of course the new wave of productivity with the .NET Framework with ADO.NET and System.Xml. We also have been a big part of the WinFS project. The main way to get all the details is to visit our MSDN sites: msdn.com/data and msdn.com/xml.

ADO.NET and XML are siblings!

Hey, this is starting to look like the beginnings of one of Roger Jennings’ historical analyses! 🙂

Astoria, the data service project (think web services that expose data) based on Entity Framework, which was introduced at MIX07, has moved from the incubator to being a full fledged product with a team and a blog. READ MORE.

[A New DevLife post]