At the time Ted wrote that in 2006, EF hadn't been released yet, but he was aware of work going on around ORM at Microsoft. Early versions of EF were pretty much panned by developers. EF 4.0 changed much of that.

>Also, since this was written in 2006 it spoke to the tools available at the time as well as the conceptual model ( of the idea of ORM, not in the EDM sense ).
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>In Julia's first edition of her EF book she lists the heartbreakers of EF in the 3.5 and then in her 4.0 stuff talks about how they had for the most part been addressed.
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>But the remaining "adventures" in the current MS implementation are still a highly esoteric area for those of us who are just trying to use the damn thing to write apps. That is *why* I'm a big framework guy and leaning toward DevForce as being a way of being shielded from some of my own ignorance. Like VFE in VFP to SQL use, and Strataframe in using Winforms it is nice to have people who have pulled out their own hair dealing with issues I didn't even know were issues and giving me a higher level implementation. I don't know if what they do is perfect but I know it is a lot closer to it than what I'm going to put together 'rolling my own' <g>
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>One of the important points I'm seeing in the Devforce implementation is decoupling of the Entity Server - which actually deals with EF as a server side manager - and the EntityManager which is a local object cache that can function disconnected. I'm not 100% up to speed on the implications, but I'm very excited about the design as it just makes good sense to me on its face. ( Strataframe has a similar thing in their Enterprise Server for business objects but it is a separately licensed server product, and deals only with SF business objects in a winforms/sql db environment )