Ok, I have been digging into EF (with Julia Lerman's book) and loving it and have been digging into Silverlight and loving it. I have 3 applications to build and one is pretty large (184 tables, 331 relations, lots of sprocs, some views, etc) and the other 2 are small (14 tables, 12 relations, sprocs, and a couple of views).
I am the sole developer at my company (translated to I am the dba, .NET Architect, lead C# developer, and everything else that can be in the development world) and am trying to pick my architecture for the applications. Here is where I am leaning so far, Csla for the architecture (why would I pick anything else!)
The DB is SQL 2005 as I cannot convince our parent company to go to 2008 - any help in persuading them to go to 2008 would be greatly appreciated or why I should not go to 2008 would be greatly appreciated. Will be utilizng SQL Server Reporting Services for the reporting also.
The applications are to be web based either internat or intranet, leaning toward internet more.
1) for the small applications:
a) utilize the EF for the data modeling,
b) utilize Silverlight 2 for the front end
2) for the large applications:
a) would love to use EF, however I am wondering if it makes sense or would it make sense to just stick with ADO.NET. Linq to SQL is pretty much on it's way out but with so many tables, I am envisioning the Entity Data Model (EDM) to be a monster. Has anyone created a large application with EF and were you happy you did, or do you wish you hadn't? Your experience will be most appreciated.
b) utilize Silverlight 2 for the front end
Also, I am working for a company that doesn't particularly like to spend $ on IT. Yes, I know, we are essential, and people get upset when things don't work and want it fixed, but, they think IT is overhead.
Any perspective would be greatly appreciated and if Rocky or Sergey respond that would be awesome because their expertise and experience are golden in my book!
CyclingFoodmanPA
I haven't used EF, but created a large application comparable in size to the one you mention using CSLA and an Object-Relational mapper (there are several to choose from, with NHibernate being a notable free one).
Use of an ORM gives you some degree of independence from the whims of Microsoft. You often have the source code, aren't tied to a particular technology that gets killed a few months after being the latest and greatest thing, and they support multiple back-end databases as well. Usually there are code generation tools to help.
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