The Microsoft ADO.NET team have just announced in a blog post that as of .NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be their recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios meaning that LINQ to SQL will be superseded. In my opinion both solutions each have advantages and disadvantages and merging the two technologies will hopefully take the best bits from both projects.

The move will probably dissolution many development teams that have made investments in learning and moving to LINQ to SQL and are not interested in the extra weight and complexity which comes with the EF. There were also issues raised from within the .NET community with the first version of the EF which shipped with .NET 3.5 mainly based around the lack of lazy loading and performance.

I have worked with two different kind of developers. One kind of developer does not care about the extra mapping features found in the EF and in fact the extra complexity acts as a barrier to adoption. The other kind of developer cares passionately about mapping his object model to his database model and has already been sold on using nHibernate for this as it has already been proven to work. For the first kind of developer this news is not going to be welcomed unless Microsoft makes it easy for these developers and the code they already have to move to using the Entity Framework. For the second kind of developer Microsoft is going to have to work very hard to prove that the EF is mature and ready for mainstream use.