The previous chapter examined the fundamentals of ADO.NET. ADO.NET has enabled .NET programmers to work with relational data (in a relatively straightforward manner) since the initial release of the .NET platform. However, Microsoft introduced a new component of the ADO.NET API called the Entity Framework (or simply, EF) in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1.
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While this first version of EF was widely criticized, the EF team at Microsoft has been hard at work releasing new versions. The current version ...