Entity Framework owes a lot to the feedback of the nHibernate crew who, as Roger Jennings so aptly states, “were responsible for making the Entity Framework folks finally understand what persistence ignorance is all about”.

The PI side of EF still has a long way to go, so in the meantime nHibernate continues to get stronger and stronger.

The alpha of a new version that logs over 100,000 lines of code changes was just released.

I know those guys are beyond frustrated with the current state of Entity Framework and the persistence of people like me who are curious about it and continue to share what I learn with whoever wants to listen, rather than just telling them to run away from data centric programming and join the ALT.NET wave. But what can I say. I embrace the options even if I can’t become expert in them all.

Anyway, this release is a huge accomplishment and to have it be done with the dedication of what it takes in an Open Source environmnet to roll out a tool that can be used in big enterprise applications is really impressive.

Highlights of this post from Timothy Ng of the VB team:

“Over the last few months, the VB and Data Programmability teams were working on fixing a performance problem with LINQ to SQL (which also manifested in LINQ to Entities). The issue was that LINQ to SQL was generating sub optimal T-SQL queries when the VB LINQ queries included filters over nullable columns.”