I have been trying to implement LiNQ to SQL where ever and whenever I can. It just saves so much time and effort with standard CRUD applications and especially for little import utilities. The company I work for gets multiple daily updates from numerous companies in .xls format and I’ve found that moving the import utilities over to the .Net framework 3.5 is saving me a lot of time and effort.

LiNQ is so easy to understand and quick to implement so its basically become the office benchmark. No more stored procedures for updating records and/or inserting records. Now I’ve heard about the Entity Framework for quite a while but haven’t really looked at it much. Since I am off work sick today I decided to have a look at it.

To be honest, it hasn’t immediately grabbed my attention. It seems to be very similar to LiNQ to SQL. I realize that its a rather broad generalization but in my case its true. So far all I’ve seen that the Entity framework basically just provides an abstraction layer for your database model so that when you make changes, you don’t need to rebuild your DBML structures. Please keep in mind I have only looked at this for an hour or so.

The biggestest benefit I can see is the interaction with databases other than SQL Server. This obviously has huge implications for those developers who don’t use SQL but since the company I work for purely works on SQL Server it doesn’t hold much appeal to me yet. There seems to be a massive overlap between LiNQ to SQL and LiNQ to Entities so my guess is after a year or two LiNQ to SQL is probably going to fall away quickly. I firmly believe Microsoft had their exceptionally lofty ambitions for LiNQ to Entities but they knew they would not be able to deliver on time so they pushed out LiNQ to SQL for the meantime to developers used to the LiNQ syntax.

From what I can see, the database modeling in LiNQ to SQL seems to be closer than that of the Entity Framework. The entity framework provides numerous other functions but I’ll include that in a later blog post.

Mark my words:
“LiNQ to SQL will give way to The Entity Framework withing 2-3 years”