EF

Sending classic EF into retirement together with .NET Framework: in the new microservices projects EF Core has been accepted as the primary ORM, and there's no reason left to go back to the old EF.

Classic EF keeps working in the .NET Framework projects for now, but we're starting to move those projects to .net core for the sake of multiplatform support. There the main ORM will be either EF Core or Dapper — we're eyeing both.

At work I get the chance to build with ASP.NET MVC. At first I prefer to set things up with Dapper, but I quickly find out that TSQL isn't nearly as intuitive for everyone as I thought, so to keep things easy to maintain I decide to pair ASP.NET MVC with EF or L2Db, depending on whether it's Code First or Db First.

For ASP.NET MVC and the data-access style it encourages, EF turns out to be a more native fit than Dapper.

Entity Framework is the fashionable, feature-packed tool that literally everyone won't stop talking about. Key features:

• Full support for the Code First approach
• You can know zero TSQL and still create and modify databases. It handles migrations for you.
• Version control for data schemas. You can roll back
• Bulk-insert whole collections of data
• There's a change tracker, so you can accumulate changes and then ship them off in a single transaction.

And on top of that it has all the advantages of linq-to-sql

A powerful tool, but way too much machinery for my current tasks.