Yes, it was me. I posted a link to Ted Neward's blog post on it, as well as his followup the next day. Keep in mind that he wrote that before EF was public knowledge. That doesn't mean that EF is a cure-all and handles everything Ted brought up.

Perhaps a better way to approach the discussion is to rethink how you design an application. There's been lots of changes in this regard since we started working in Fox. Do some reading on Domain Driven Design. You'll find it makes lots of sense and is a very good approach. One thing you get out of it is that you use Entities for data. How you represent those Entities (code yourself with ADO.NET? EF? NHibernate? Something else?) is open for discussion. But, if you compare EF to what Martin Fowler calls "Table Record" (which is what ADO.NET is), you'll find that for some apps, EF is overkill, and TableRecord works great, but once you start getting any complexity, TableRecord breaks down quickly and becomes much harder to use than EF. Where that point is at differs on every app, but once you've committed to TableRecord, it's difficult to move to EF.

I totally agree with you on WPF vs. WinForms.


>So the argument is down to whether you use classic ADO.NET dataset/datatables or use some ORM model (EF is not the only option) ?
>Someone posted a link recently (Craig?) which made a pretty good job of hi-lighting the potential shortcomings of any ORM approach and is well worth reading...
>But I. like you, think it's very possible to make a longer list of the shortcomings of *not* doing so. Regardless of whether your organisation opts for EF or not your associates are being naive in thinking they will become proficient .NET programmers without a good understanding (and use) of Linq in its many forms. It's not just Linq to Entities - Linq to objects, Linq to XML, Linq- to- whatever -they will need to understand it and make use of it.
>
>Oh, and I think " In EF you set your new values and then call SaveChanges" is a bit of an over simplification. You will still need to deal with conflict resolution etc.......
>
>P.S - While you're at it : Pitch for WPF over WinForms