One of the most frustrating parts of developing an application that needs to read data from and write data to some sort of database is trying to get the communication layer between your code and the database established.
At least, it used to be, until Entity Framework came into the picture!
Entity Framework is an object-relational mapper (ORM). It maps your .NET Code objects to relational database entities. As simple as that. Now, you don't have to concern yourself with scaffolding the required data access code just to handle plain CRUD operations.
When the first version of Entity Framework was released with .NET 3.5 SP1 in August 2008, the initial response wasn't that great—so much so that a group of developers signed a vote of no confidence with regard to the framework. Thankfully, most of the concerns that were raised were...