I decided to revisit Entity Framework for a project I’m working on.  It’s been a while since the last time I gave EF a fair shake (way back when it was first released).  I can sum up my impressions of the 4.5 version with a single word: disappointing.  EF has come a very long way since the initial release, no question about that, but there are still so many areas where NHibernate trumps it that I can’t imagine using it for a real production app.  Code First is a pale imitation of Fluent NHibernate, and EF’s schema generation capabilities are very limited compared to what NHibernate can do.  For example, I cannot do something as simple as define a unique key, nor can I incrementally update the schema of an existing database without using migrations.  The only point that I do actually like is the idea of the DbContext as a “gateway” to the database.  I think this would make it easier to enforce aggregate root boundaries when compared to NHibernate’s overly-powerful (and overly-complex) ISession interface. 

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