Top 10 Treats in Entity Framework 4

Just finished watching Julia Lerman's video of the top 10 treats in EF4. These include pluralisation/singularisation improvements, foreign key support, new code generation features, lazy loading (enabled by default), T4 code generation, POCO support (convention over configuration), self tracking entities for WCF and new state management methods.

I've been using LINQ-to-SQL for my SQL Server based projects, primarily because the ASP.NET MVC demo's I had watched all used it and many blog posts warned me away from EF. Scott Gu created a quick EF model at the Guathon last week and I was surprised at how straightforward it seemed, so thought I would give it a go. I'm liking using EF and it's new features, however I'm a little concerned about investing in it when I know there are going to be many times when I have no choice but to use Oracle. I know there are some Oracle EF providers out there, but they need to be purchased, something which is difficult to justify after already investing heavily in the MS stack. Should NHibernate therefore be my ORM tool of choice - time to look into it a bit more and see how easy it is to use...