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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T20:52:40+00:00

Reading about the lack of persistence ignorance in Entity Framework I often stumble upon

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Reading about the lack of persistence ignorance in Entity Framework I often stumble upon POCO Adapter. The question is, does anyone use it in production, how does it go and what are the pitfalls?

I consider two alternatives for the application design: use POCOs with that adapter in business logic and make the presentation layer use them or create a service layer converting between EF Entities and DTOs:
(1) EF entities <-> Adapter <-> POCO business objects <-> Presentation
or
(2) EF entities <-> Service layer <-> DTOs <-> Presentation.
The first approach seems to be more clean, but I’m somewhat hesitating about POCO Adapter is not being very standard solution and may contain some shortcomings not evident right now.

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  1. Editorial Team

    EFPocoAdapter has been deprecated in favor of Entity Framework 4.0. The beta release was announced less than a week ago and you can already download Beta 1 if you’re an MSDN subscriber.

    There is no reason to use EFPocoAdapter anymore. I would also encourage you to read the ADO.NET Entity Framework Design Team blog for a list of all the features on EF 4.0, it’s an excellent read.

    Also have a look at this blog post: POCO in the Entity Framework: Part 1 – The Experience.

    As to my experience with EFPocoAdapter, I was/am happy with the support for POCO, lazy loading and n-tier scenarios. Entity Framework builds on this further by providing T4 templates among other things, something which I really felt lacking (though many prefer to hand-code their POCO classes). The other issues I had were serializer issues with JavaScriptSerializer which doesn’t handle circular references while DataContractSerializer which does, requires class/member attributes which prior to T4 templates weren’t possible with auto-generated classes.

    The EFPocoAdapter was always meant to be a sort of staging platform to get feedback from the community and develop the feature-set for EF 4.0. While it is a bit rough around the edges I did manage to fulfil my requirements, albeit after a few exchanges with Jaroslaw. That and support was very bleak (few people on forums or stack overflow).

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