How is the .net Entity Framework overkill versus LinqToSql?

Question

I\'ve heard it said that the Entity Framework is overkill or that it\'s difficult to learn compared to LinqToSql.

I am wondering in what way? I used LinqToSql and like

Answer 1

Linq to SQL and Entity Framework are conceptually different beasts and you should make your choice based on how they fit your needs rather than on microbenchmarks. Even if Entity Framework was slower, it is the focus of the ADO.NET team at Microsoft and will be improved many times. Linq-to-SQL is effectively frozen.

Conceptually they are different in that Linq-to-SQL is just a way of performing database queries using Linq. Sounds obvious enough, but the point is: You are accessing the data, structured as per the database model of it. Although FKs are trasformed appropriately you still have excess objects where data was normalised into different tables. Every query you write has to cope with that kind of thing.

Entity Framework allows you to declaratively construct a layer that represents your data the way it should be represented in memory, bringing data from multiple tables into a single object where approriate; representing many-to-many relationships as collection properties, etc. And the queries you write then will be to this model and will be much cleaner and more obvious in purpose (no more 15 table joins!).

O'Reilly have a comprehensive book coming out Entity Framework on 15th Januray 2009 (preview available now on Roughcuts) if you're unsure about using Entity Framework - the MSDN documentation for it does pretty much suck at the moment which makes proposing it even harder. I do believe it's worth using in long run for all but the most trivial of projects (and personally if I was writing something trivial I'd just use ADO.NET2 directly and forget about Linq).