Responding to how EF is better NH commentary…

time to read 3 min | 488 words

My last post caused quite a bit of furor, and I decided that I wanted to respond to all the comments in a single place.

  • EF has a designer, NHibernate does not.
    This is actually false, NHibernate has multiple designers available for it. Active Writer (Free, OSS, integrated into VS), Visual NHibernate (Commercial, Beta) and LLBLGen (Commercial, forthcoming in early 2010). I would say that using a designer with NHibernate isn’t something that is very common, most people tend to either code gen the entire model and tweak that (minority) or hand craft the model & mapping. That isn’t for lack of options, it is because it is simply more efficient to do so in most cases.
  • EF is from Microsoft.
    Yes, it is. That is a good point, because it reflect on support & documentation. Unfortunately, the fact that this was one of the most prominent reasons quoted in the replies is also interesting. It says a lot about the relative quality of the products themselves. Another issue with a data access framework from Microsoft is that history teaches us that few data access methods from Microsoft survive the 2 years mark, and none survive the 5 years mark. RDO, ADO, ADO.Net, Object Spaces, Linq To Sql, Entity Framework – just to name a few.
  • Downstream integration.
    That was mentioned a few times, as in integration with data services, WCF RIA, etc. I want to divide my comment to that into two parts. First, everything that exists right now can be use with NHibernate. Second, EF is supposed to come with reporting / BI tools in the future. Currently, everything that came up was easily usable with NHibernate, so I am not really worried about it.
  • In the Future it will be awesome.
    Some people pointed out that Microsoft is able to allocate more resources for EF than an OSS project can. That is true to a point. One of the problems that Microsoft is facing is that it has to pay a huge amount of taxes in the way to create a releasable product. That means that it is typically easier for an OSS project to release faster than a comparable Microsoft project.

So far, I find it really interesting that no one came up with any concrete feature that EF can do that NHibernate can’t. I am going to let you in on a secret, when EF was announced, there were exactly two things that it could do that NHibernate could not. Both were fixed before EF 1.0 shipped, just because that fact annoyed me.

Are you telling me that no such thing exists for the new version?