Umm, yeah. That could turn into a conference unto itself. After you run through the little wizard, you have something pretty easy to use, but under the covers, it’s amazing how much functionality and control they’ve baked in to a version 1 product.
Since EF originated with the ADO.NET team, it’s actually pretty performant. In some tests Julie ran for a recent CoDE Magazine article, she shows the EF to be about 10x faster than Linq to SQL (which originated with the C# team, but has been transferred to the ADO.NET Team), and faster than even ADO.NET Data Adapters.
I’m pencilled in to present the EF at Pittsburgh .NET in February, and Nate and I are going to begin to incorporate it into Scrumr. That mean’s there’s going to be some serious rearchitecting of the app, but it’ll be worth it in the long run. As we go through the process, Nate and I will be blogging about our experiences.