So it looks like I can finally scrap Gemli.Data, as Microsoft finally caught up with me. ;) I’m sort-of kidding (on being the one Microsoft caught up with), but sorta not. Microsoft has a new CTP out there for Entity Framework where the POCO support has a bit less suck and a lot more “just .Save() my POCO object”. According to Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post, which is really the full extent I have seen this and I have only just glanced at it to be honest, but the new syntax it offers to take a simple simple coded-first object and persist it to a database looks almost exactly like my approach to Gemli.Data at http://gemli.codeplex.com/. In a few ways, this Magical Unicorn edition looks even cleaner. But it also clearly adds the advantages of true and complete LINQ support, as well as tested ASP.NET MVC (et al) data binding and even data scaffolding with HTML forms .. and automated validation .. the list keeps growing.
So this is good news for me. Not many people were using Gemli besides me that I knew of, and if I can get back to focusing on coding implementation code and forget about my passionate hatred of data-first development, all the better.
I’ll admit I hate the idea of throwing away my work, but if I don’t need it I don’t need it. On the other hand, this version of Entity Framework (or this extension, or whatever) isn’t released yet, so I’m still stuck with Gemli until it is.