Entity Framework 6: The Ninja Edition

With the latest major release of Entity Framework, EF6, the Microsoft object-relational mapping (ORM) tool has reached new heights of “ninja-ness.” It’s no longer the country cousin to long-established .NET ORM tools. EF is all grown up, and it’s winning over former die-hards. Entity Framework has evolved through the choppy waters of its infancy, where it began as a tool focused on database developers—and inspired the wrath of agile developers within the .NET community. It learned how to get out of the way of application development and shifted to a Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) model, enabling testing and domain-focused software development without disenfranchising data-focused developers. It addressed performance issues and numerous concerns about the quality of generated code, and won over many database administrators (DBAs) along the way.