Question

the question has been changed as

Give a brief overview of Entity Framework(EF)

What are some other ORMs (Object Relational Mapping) that are comparable to EF?

Do you think EF makes life easier for the developer?

What is your experience so far?

Answer 1

Give a brief overview of Entity Framework(EF)
Entity Framework is an Object Relational Mapping Framework offered by Microsoft for .NET applications. The main objective is to remove the cumbersome and error-prone involved in creating the database and activities involved in database mapping.

EF lets the developer work with data using an object without much worrying about the underlying database. The need of writing data-access code is being eliminated by EF.

Without EF:
String sqlQuery = "SELECT studentName FROM Students WHERE studentId = 1"
Db cmd = new Db(connectionString, sqlQuery);
Result result = cmd.Execute();
String name = result[0]["NAME"];

With EF:
Student s = repo.GetStudent(1);
String name = s.Name;

What are some other ORMs (Object Relational Mapping) that are comparable to EF?
NHibernate is another ORM which is similar to EF. In EF, you should extend base class entity to perform operations but NHibernate provides more flexible operations. It supports Inheritance mapping, unidirectional association mapping. It has object-oriented power similar to EF. It provides backward compatibility.

Do you think EF makes life easier for the developer? What is your experience so far?.
Of course, it makes the programmer life easier.
Some of the reasons,
-> Less error-prone: Manual mapping susceptible to more human errors.
-> Less time: It helps to reduce the development efforts which in turn reduces the time taken.
-> Productivity: It makes the developer be more productive by ignoring some process.
-> Complexity: The complexity of the code is being reduced by using object-oriented database mapping.
-> Easy to understand: The code readability would be simple since data members are represented using object and internal details are encapsulated and wrapped.
-> Support and Maintenance: Debugging the code would be easier, less cumbersome and maintaining the existing code would be easier.
-> Cross Platform: It is a cross-platform application which would help the developer to use it in any system.
-> Concurrency: It uses concurrency control in the database.
-> Caching: Information is being cached.
-> Modelling: It creates an Entity Data Model from a Plain Old CLR object which can be used for querying.