OK, so I'm planning my move from FoxPro to Visual Studio 2008, and studying all the ORM and 3rd party application framework stuff...

So... I am trying to figure out if the upcoming (from Microsoft) Entity Data Model and ADO.NET Entity Framework will (or should, or could) replace all the other ORM packages, specifically the ORM part of The Mere Mortals Framework that I am considering using?

Should one expect that all existing 3rd party UI control packages and frameworks would easily work (i.e. bind) against this new ADO.NET Enitiy Framework? After all, don't they all bind to object references and properties, without caring what the underlying tool was that created those data-representing objects?

It seems that since Microsoft is adding what I assume will be a feature-rich and otherwise sufficient ORM component to .NET, that all the other 3rd party ORM tools now have some competition directly from Microsoft, and I'm pretty sure the ADO.NET Entity Framework is going to be free. I've always thought it was redundant for so many vendors to make ORM packages. I mean, how many choices do we need for that solution? Now Microsoft has added it as a standard tool and I'm hoping it is good enough, so that I do not have to choose (and buy) one of the the 3rd party ORM packages, or even one of the free ones that are out there.

I know for me, that if Microsoft has a tool for something, I've generally been very pleased with it. So I'm wondering why I wouldn't use this new tool to handle my ORM stuff, expecting that it will work the best with Visual Studio and SQL Server.