>>Interesting link.
>>Skipping the whole 'Vietnam war' analogy he has some good anti-ORM arguments. But often (for example with object queries) he spends three or four paragraphs hi-lighting one potential shortcoming only to point out in the next three paragraphs that there are alternatives that avoid the problem.
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>>And, of course, the whole article is devoted to pointing out these ORM problems with no reference to other, equally problem-ridden, alternative strategies.
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>>Actually, I've always found it odd that taking a well-designed relational datbase and then, as soon as you issue a join, flattening the whole thing out again is not regarded as an impedence mismatch ?
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>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 )
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I have always been with you on this. I'm sure it would be a terrific learning exercise but there is no way I could develop my own framework for $695 worth of labor. I am really grateful to the tool builders. VFE alone made me a small fortune.