Introducing Entity Framework

So what is Entity Framework (EF)? Is it some other fancy framework that I need to learn? If these thoughts are coming to mind, get rid of them, as EF is just a set of .NET APIs for accessing data. EF is the official data access tool from Microsoft. Like most Microsoft products, it originated from Microsoft Research, and later it was adopted by the ADO.NET team as the next innovation in Microsoft's data access technology. EF has evolved over time. It had a sluggish start in 2008 when developers found it hard to digest a new way of accessing data. But with EF4 (yes, the second version of EF was 4, as it was aligned with .NET 4), it had become the norm to use EF for data accessing with .NET. Continuing the journey, it became open source in version EF6 and moved to CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com). This opened up new avenues for EF. As it became...