OR/M Madness in Microsoft
It looks like someone in Microsoft is loving OR/M even more than I do. They are going to release two competing OR/M frameworks. DLinq (now Linq for SQL) and Linq for Entities.
I guess that no one in microsoft has read In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters. It is going to Windows 9x vs Windows NT all over again.
- How are you going to explain to a customer what is the difference between the two?
- How are they going to choose?
- What is the upgrade path between the two?
- Which customer exactly is going to use the "simple but limited" framework?
- What about future development of DLinq? Will it try to reach feature parity with Linq For Entities?
Someone needs their head examined, I think.
I have no problem whatsoever with giving different levels of abstraction for different problems (see NHibernate & Active Record, for instance) but those are two different framework from the same vendor to do the same thing.
Imagine the architecture talks:
- Now we will talk about the data access. We have decided to use Microsoft's OR/M.
- Which Microsoft OR/M ? There is Linq for SQL and Linq for Entities.
- Huh? What is the difference?
- No one know for sure. They say that Linq for SQL is for simple stuff, and Linq for Entities is for complex things.
- We are not build simple software, we will use Linq for Entities. But if they need to offer a second framework, just to make us use their OR/M, maybe this Linq for Entities is too hard to use?