Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework

Chapter 15. Using the Entity Framework as a Data Source

The Entity Data Model (EDM) is the SQL Server Data Programmability (DP) group's strategic approach to data modeling and the Entity Framework (EF) is the group's first concrete implementation of EDM as a data source for .NET Frameworks. LINQ to SQL is an obvious data source alternative to EF; many developers prefer LINQ to SQL because of its better performance as well as reduced memory and processor resource consumption. However, Microsoft is making only a small ongoing investment in LINQ to SQL, so it's not likely that LINQ to SQL will gain a significantly expanded feature set in future versions.

The DP Group promotes EF as the preferred — and only updatable without modification — relational data source for the ADO.NET Data Services Framework (formerly code-named "Project Astoria" and still commonly called "Astoria") ADO.NET Data Services gained "Framework" status in early February 2008, which is very rapid promotion of a technology that was introduced less than a year earlier at Microsoft's MIX 07 conference in late April and early May 2007. References to Astoria first included the "Framework" term in a February 3, 2008 Project Astoria Team Blog post by software architect Pablo Castro, who described Astoria's objective as follows:

In general, the goal of the ADO.NET Data Services Framework is to create a simple REST-based framework for exposing data centric services. We built the framework in part from analysis of traditional ...