Eric Nelson explains what are ORM, EDM, and ESQL, what is the difference between LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities, which one is going to be further developed by Microsoft in the future, accompanied by hands on demos showing how to use them.
In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2008, Mads Torgersen discusses LINQ, declarative programming and metaprogramming in C#, examples of LINQ syntax and usage, lazy evaluation of LINQ queries, extension methods, lambda expressions, LINQ-to-SQL, LINQ expressions and metaprogramming, expression trees, how the .Net Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) works, PLINQ, and the future of the DLR.
Microsoft has announced that the upcoming Entity Framework 5 could potentially improve performance up to 67 percent. Developers using EF 4.0 should also see performance improvements just by upgrading to .NET Framework 4.5.
LLBLGen Pro is an ORM tool which supports multiple persistence frameworks: LLBLGen Pro Runtime, Entity Framework, NHibernate and LINQ to SQL. Other new features are: support for .NET 4.0, model-first or database-first development mode, model view, project validation.
Sadly the terms “ORM” and “performance problems” often travel together. By hiding the underlying SQL from the developers, ORMs can offer a huge productivity boost. Unfortunately they also make it easy to generate ridiculously bad queries without realizing it. And without stored procedures to cross reference, finding the offending code without an ORM-specific profiler can be quite tricky.
Damien Guard of Microsoft’s Data Programmability has posted a rather long list of the changes to LINQ to SQL. While they are still committed to Entity Framework over the long run, this will do much to alleviate the fear LINQ to SQL will be completely neglected in the mean time.
