Version 5.0 of the Entity Framework is a fairly major update to Microsoft's ORM. While there are several improvements and additions, we will only briefly examine the improvements as they relate to the use of EF5 in the development of our BrewHow app.
Under the hood, Microsoft has squeezed every ounce of performance it can out of the framework. One of the key performance enhancements is the automatic use of compiled queries—a query in which the LINQ to Entities expression tree has been translated into pure SQL. To accomplish this, upon first invocation the EF5, the framework configures all of the components the query needs, caches certain components of the query, and stores them locally in the memory so that any subsequent invocations do not need to be translated or have resources loaded. This greatly increases performance of a warmed-up application.