History And Evolution Of Microsoft Entity Framework

Because they were working on LINQ, LINQ to SQL make sense to them. So it was the time when two ORMs met together and made some sense for the Entity framework. When the entity framework team saw LINQ, it obviously made a lot of sense for the EF team to use it for querying because the “LINQ to SQL” team was already using it for querying. [Note: LINQ to SQL is a string based querying ORM]. So they created the implementation of LINQ for entity framework and then we had LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities.

LINQ to Entities (Entity Framework):

LINQ to Entities is a part of entity framework that can go to any database.

LINQ to SQL:

LINQ to SQL was specifically written to work with SQL that time.

LINQ to SQL VS Entity Framework

When it comes to choosing an ORM for data access, which should one choose, LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities? There is a lot of confusion about it and the answer is straight “entity framework” because it has cool features for developers.

Another fantastic feature of Microsoft Entity Framework is that it’s a Microsoft Framework after all, which means if users (developers) want some change in the running version Microsoft will do this them. This is why we can say Entity framework is more responsive to the developer crowd.

Source: Evolution of Entity framework with Julie Lerman.