front matter
Have you ever worked on an application that doesn’t use data and requires some means of interacting with a data store? In my decades as a software developer, every single application I have worked on or have helped others with has depended on reading and writing to some type of data store. When I became a solo entrepreneur in the 1990s, I came up with the name The Data Farm for my company. I am definitely a data nerd.
Over the past few decades, Microsoft has gone through many iterations of data access frameworks. If you’ve been working in this arena for a while, you might remember DAO and RDO, ADO, and ADO.NET. In 2006, Microsoft shared the first iterations of the as-yet-unnamed Entity Framework (EF), based on work done at Microsoft Research in a private meeting at TechEd. I was one of the few people invited to that meeting. It was my first time seeing an Object Relational Mapper (ORM), a library that focuses on relieving developers from the redundant drudgery of building connections and commands, writing SQL, transforming query results into objects, and transforming object changes into SQL to persist back to the database.