So how do I watch NetFlix without a Gold account? I'm stuck watching it on the Wii rather than the 360.

Windows 7 is the best Windows I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

Windows 8, on the other hand, not so much.

While you can run Mono-based apps on Apache, you are pretty much stuck with IIS for "official" asp.net.

But as far as databases, both Entity Framework and Linq have support for Oracle, MySQL, and several others. So that part of your statement is not quite accurate.

If they coded in C#, sure, I'd try to convince them. But hard to cost justify dropping an existing business codebase that uses a particular language just to pick up a better database access library.

But if you're an up and coming business, this is the way to do it.

I admit it is not a panacea, it has it's own quirks, but 99% of things are flawless. I am picky as can be, but Entity Framework has impressed me.

This is all a giant mix of hogwash and bullshit intended to discredit (amongst only the easily-impressed, low-information scientists of the validity of Doctor Emmett Brown's proven research.

Personally, I expect that many developers will end up creating web apps, and calling it a day because the app will work pretty much anywhere after a few tweaks.

> hey willingly put their heads in the guillotine by adopting YA3GL (C#/.NET) that gives no advantages unless you want to do things the Microsoft way

Gives no advantages? Bullshit. Have you ever worked with the Entity Framework under C#? Way beyond the best way of working with data I've ever encountered. I am able to crank out solid data-intensive code in 1/10 the time it would take me with NHibernate or Java with Hibernate, let alone older attempts at making data a first class citizen in the language. MVC 3 or 4 with Entity Framework 4 or 5 makes you able to crank out stuff in a few weeks that used to take a year with all the boilerplate crapCode you use to have to write. (Assuming you start with a good architecture design)

I'm thinking you must have "refractored" several "pints" there... *hic*

PS, I built TonsOfCards.com (A site for sports card collectors, buyers, and sellers. Apologies for the blatant shilling...) entirely on EF 4.3.1 and it just flies, so it's definitely useful in production with sorta-big data (16 gigs with millions of records in the database currently)

I haven't used EF against anything but MSSQL, so haven't ran into what you've experienced. Although I'd be hesitant to use it with something else, there's no way you'd get the deep integration with a third-party database server. But for solutions based on MSSQL, there's nothing better I've seen in any world.

3. Usually when I run into issues like that, I'm doing something stupid. There's a few cases (Like working with Full Text Search) where I drop back and use a stored proc, but 99% of what I do, EF and Linq has not let me down.
5. Check your project configuration, you can set it to push out the same version of EF that you used for development.
6. Who the hell is modifying the database schema in production without going through proper QA? That's a management issue, not an EF issue.
7. See #5

Paid Troll anyone?

Have you worked with C# under the .NET 4.x framework now that they've added Entity Framework to it?

It is so much more efficient that any other data access abstraction I've ever seen. It even makes Hibernate/NHibernate look like a lame hack.

I am able to do extremely complex things with 10% of the amount of code I used to have to write.

Microsoft might be making a LOT of mistakes lately, but Entity Framework is not one of them. I don't know if I'll ever have the patience to use another language again - C# with Entity Framework is that much better.

Nature abhors a pessimist...

Wow, I really liked that link about Lambda Calculus! While I have used Lambdas and Anonymous Methods heavily in C#, I never knew there was a formal science devoted to it.

It was cool for me, as both a GED student and a lead developer, to read something on an advanced math subject and fully understand it. However, for the same reason I am a relatively advanced programmer (Business, nothing cool like videogames) I would never have learned it from that article - what an atrocious syntax! Why is so hard to describe something so easy?