Introducing the ADO.NET 4.0 Entity Framework
Apress eBooks · 2010
In July 2008 Microsoft released the first version of the ADO.NET Entity Framework as part of the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 as well as the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. At the time, Microsoft LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and LINQ to SQL had been out for a while and were gaining a lot of attention. Both the Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL showed that Microsoft was very serious about improving developer productivity, by providing an infrastructure for managing relational data as objects and programming against a conceptual model instead of directly against a storage schema. While Microsoft did its best to tout the Entity Framework, it went somewhat unnoticed out of the gate, primarily due to the rise in popularity of LINQ to SQL and the misunderstanding from the public of what the Entity Framework really was.