No mention of Entity Framework on the radar

[allymparker]

So the platform team had a quick chat today about whether we should use an ORM in one of our initial capabilities. We were debating Dapper vs EF vs ADO.net (FWIW we don't need anything more clever than select *, so we're going to just use ADO.net).

I wondered what was on the radar - Dapper is in there, but AFAIK there is no mention of EF/EF Core. Granted EF does more than typical ORMs (migrations for one) - Should we add it?

[MichelleTaylorRG]

I mean, we're certainly already using EF (in SQL Data Catalog) whether we should be or not :)

[matburton]

FWIW we don't need anything more clever than select *

Just be careful about injections with that line of thinking 😉

[fffej]

It sounds like at a minimum we should capture we're using EF - PR welcome!

I don't know the technology at all - is there a reason to ever choose NHibernate over EF Core.

It was used in Monitor, but removed years ago (see https://github.com/red-gate/sqlmonitor/pull/543) but there's not much comment on the why.

[matburton]

Might also be worth clarifying EF vs. EF Core since they're both .NET Core compatible, are fairly different and EF Core is still fairly in flux and not really complete (e.g. .GroupBy is getting better but still not there). Not dissing EF Core :wink: just trying to state some facts.

[fffej]

Thanks @matburton - hadn't realized that. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/efcore-and-ef6/ is a good place to see the differences.

[fffej]

There's now some commentary on ORMs in the radar as of #355