I had intended to be happy simply being a signatory of ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence. But, there’s people suggesting signatories of this petition are wackos or on the fringe.
Do yourself a favour and read the petition. Read what we have issues with and how we think Entity Framework (EF) can be improved to be a better product. Read seminal material by industry leaders on entity-oriented and object-oriented application development like Domain Driven Design, and Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# (and the predecessor Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices) and Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET. If after you have understand this information, you think being forced to use EF on a software development team would mean it would be hard to implement generally accepted object-oriented and entity-oriented design, the sign the petition.
Yes, you have the choice no to use EF; but you also have the choice to help people to not have to deal with the issues detailed in the petition simply because they were not made aware of them.
And despite the naysayers of people who think EF should improve, the ADO.NET team is listening and agrees.
People seem upset that EF isn’t suitable for building large and complex projects, and to be fair it probably isn’t. But then again, no ORM is suitable for building large and complex projects. The technology is fundamentally inappropriate for database driven solutions in the same way that object-orientation is.
So the fact that it doesn’t give a clean separation of data from code, or that it doesn’t handle lazy loading that well, or any of these complex project issues don’t matter. For smaller and simpler projects it will be just fine.
I’d give it a vote of no confidence, but no more than any other ORM solution.