Is Microsoft's Entity Framework a proprietary variant of NHibernate?

Question

I have no knowledge of Entity Framework and NHibernate but definitely want to learn. I want to know how to start. Whether to first read documentation of NHibernate or the default Visual Studio Entity Framework?

Is Microsoft's Entity Framework a variant of NHibernate?

• Steven Evers: EF is not a variant of nHibernate, it's completely separate, but they are competing products that fill the same role.

Answer 1

This is personal opinion, and I must tell you I'm a huge fan of nHibernate.

I'm interested in all Microsoft's initiatives to standardize things. This include in ORM.

When they released the first version of Entity Framework, they were critized enough to call what happened The ADO.NET Entity Framework Saga . Read that blog post and all the link it points to.

Soon after that, the team leader of the project agreed that it got it wrong (I can't find his original blog post, maybe it has been removed).

Today EF framework is very close to nHibernate and I will consider it again in the future because:

• Just like Unit Testing, MVC, Ajax, ... EF will eventually become the standard.
• EF is commercially supported
• nHibernate is powerful, but has only a few contributors.

While I'm too familiar with nHibernate to switch today, I would recommend you to go for Entity Framework without any hesitation.

• RPK: Here I would recommend reading this article: realworldsa.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/…
• user2567: @RPK: I agree with what is described in the article.
• eriawan: @RPK the link you mention is dead. Could you give us other working link?

Answer 2

1. Pick up Julia Lermans book "Entity Framework" and read it.

No, EF is not connected to nhibernate in any other way than that the two frameworks cover about the same business domain.