What is the actual benefit of ADO.NET Entity Framework?

Question

I was reading this article about ADO.NET Entity Framework and found it to be very interesting though in the first shot I could not decipher many things. I am reading the article again in order to fathom the real logic behind this.

a) A question cropped in my mind is why we need an ORM framework (in general)?

b) And among other ORM frameworks present for .NET like Spring.NET, Linq to Sql , NHibernate etc. why will we prefer ADO.NET Entity Framework?

Answer 1

• What?
• Why?
• Why not?

b. Subjective. I might not be able to offer a good opinion, as I have not used EF.

Answer 2

There are several advantages. Important among them are :

1. Provides dedicated functionality for CRUD operation (Create, Read, Update, Delete). Easy to implement CRUD operations.

2. If you want to replace the data store, it is very easy to replace without modifying the data access logic since all data access logic are present in higher level.

3. Easy to manage one to one, one to many and many to many relationship between tables.

4. Conceptual model can be represented in a better way.

5. Developer can reduce the code in classes and sub-classes for data access.