Question

What do the people mean when talking of the plurality naming “problem” in context of Entity Framework?

Answer 1

From http://www.cnblogs.com/zjz008/archive/2010/06/03/1750442.html (re: Entity Framework 4.0 Features)…

Plurality Naming

One of the big complaints in the first
version of the Entity Framework was
how naming conventions were applied to
EDM objects such as entities and
navigation properties when using the
model wizards.

The first version of
the Entity Framework gave the Entity
Name and the Entity Set Name the same
name. There was no attempt to
singularize or pluralize names when
generating a model from a database.
The problem is that this caused some
confusion when referencing the
database table or EntityType in code.
For example, if your database has a
table called Employees, then you will
also get an EntityType called
Employees as well. This causes
confusion about whether you are
referencing the table or the
EntityType, such as in the code
fragment below.

Customers customer = new Customers();

Luckily, this issue
has been addressed. The model wizards,
both the Entity Data Model and Update
Model Wizards, now provide the option
of using singular or plural forms of
names for entities, entity sets, and
navigation properties.

The goal of
this change was to make the
application code much easier to read
and avoid a lot of the confusion
between object names.