Question

I read a lot of articles about how to work with a database in WPF .Net 4 application. As I understood, the main two technologies are:

• LINQ to SQL (L2S)
• Entity Framework (EF)

but sometimes I also can see mention of LINQ to Entities (L2E) technology, but can’t find clear explanation what difference between EF and L2E.

Is there any difference between Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities technologies or this is two synonyms for one technology?

Answer 1

There are two ways of writing queries with Entity Framework:

• LINQ to Entities ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386964.aspx )
• Entity SQL ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387145.aspx )

L2E is not a separate technology, but rather a part of EF.

Have a look at this article for a comparison:
http://thedatafarm.com/blog/data-access/choosing-linq-to-entities-vs-entity-sql-vs-entityclient/