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This is a follow up article from Legacy data with Entity Framework.
One can only love Linq, however this is not true about the ADO.NET Entity Framework and therefore Linq to Entities. With the announcement of the abolishment of Linq to SQL I would of thought that EF would be a really good replacement. I now can tell you that Microsoft still has a lot to do to get it right.
EF feels clumsy, it does not react as expected. For example, I create an entity from table “tbl_Customers” and name the entity “Customers” I expect all references to that entity to be “Customers” but this is not the case. I now create an Entity called “Regions” from table “tbl_Regions” and do a reference from RegionID in Region to RegionID in Customers. I then expect to be able to call Customers in Regions as follows Regions.Cutomers simple. However, if the property “” is not set as well as the name I have to the call as follows Regions.tbl_Customers. Why should I have to name anything more then the entity name? If that is not clumsy I really don’t know what is.
Furthermore, creating inherited entities is next to impossible, the fact is that you have to use NULLS in your table to differentiate between entities, using legacy tables this was not an option and even when you manage there is a lot of other issues. Let me elaborate