Any plans to move to the Entity Framework?

First of all, this is an AWESOME open source project that is well organized and about as scalable as it gets...

Great job...

I was wondering if you planned on moving toward the entity framework provided in .NET 3.5 and Linq.  I see tons of places where Linq to SQL or Linq to Entities could speed things up or at least compress some of the classes and eliminate others completely.

If you have planned to steer clear of the entity framework, I'd be curious as to why.  

I've been going through making this switch in a lot of the classes for personal aesthetic reasons and it seems to centralize a lot of the "DBMapping" into one location instead of having 8 overloads in the Product class.  Just my two cents.

It also seems a lot of the "Utilities" regions can be abstracted into base classes or even extensions using Generics.

Am I wrong in these assessments?  Still, it's a great tool out-of-the-box!

Great work, community!

-Daniel

Daniel,
Thanks for suggestions. But we don't plan to move to the EF. But I absolutely agree about some refactoring.

Thanks, bud!  I was just curious as to why.  One reason I understand why not is because it's insanely readable!  Great job guys!  This is certainly a foundation to work with.

-D

I think that EF is not mature for a 100% switch in n-tier applications, but it's not a all or nothing decision.
Why not keep good old SPs for CRUD operations and use EF for add-on queries and admin utilities

Seems pretty viable and mature to me.  I'm not a SQL guru and the EF seems to handle all the CRUD ops that I need to throw at it.  I'm not saying it's the best solution, just one that really seems to work for me and it compresses classes.  A well abstracted application (like the one I'm converting this to) can make use of any n-Tier environment.  

Linq-to-SQL and Linq-to-Entities (to me) cuts out the middle man of needing to keep up with a datareader and delegates on object queries.  It may not be for everyone, but it's insane fast and simple to implement.  Just saying.  I'm in no way sayin what's currently available in Nop isn't full of awesome right out of the box...

-D

In theory i would agree with you, but if the EF team at Microsoft says that EF v 4 will bring 'much improvement' to n-tier asp.net application, hehe, it probably means that something was missing in v1.

That said I only have EF in prod on windows apps. For websites I have done some experiences that I have reported in my blog here :

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2215/Discover-Entity-Framework-with-DotNetNuke-and-the-Store-module.aspx

BTW have you built an EF library class for nopcommerce ?

I'll check out the blog in a bit.  

So far, I LOVE what Linq brings to the table because I'm not the bestest SQL guy.  I can get the job done, but I hit google about every 5 minutes to create my statements.  So, I :heart: it!  I'm curious to see what M$ does with the latest iteration of Linq!

I've refactored the whole library to suite my needs.  Using Linq To SQL and an abstracted "data gateway" to handle all data access...  I'm building a more strict business layer over it.  Once that's done, I'm compiling it and hopefully not touching it again.

Then I'm going to the existing ASPX pages to wire it all up. Been a long haul so far...  I want to take more time and go in and rework it exactly is it exists and use Linq and EF.  That way, I can share it with the rest of the world.  It's kinda custom right now for our needs.  I will definitely share the final for anyone interested.  May be a while, though.  

Going to read your blog, now...

I've been working A LOT with EF(.net 3.5) and .NET 3's LINQ model and I DO NOT recommend using it.
Even MS said it is not a production ready framework and they've recommended to wait for EF from .net 4.
The tons of limitations, obscure functionality at some point, performance and caching, but also the actual generated SQL are very problematic.
I'd say that is not going to work well either untill first SP.
Adi

I've got it working fine and running somewhat faster using the EF.  From what I've experienced, there are a lot of tweaks to be made to the EF and I'm itching to get my hands on .NET 4, but it's a great showing for version "1" if you ask me.  Do I think EF is a PL/SQL killer?  Absolutely not!  But I love it because my SQL skills aren't great.  Just my opinion and I by NO means believe NopCommerce, as is stands, is missing out or lacking anything.  Different strokes.