Well, maybe not. I’ve been reviewing over the weekend my approaches to learning, and after reading considerably, I think Entity Framework isn’t the right path for me at the moment. So many are reporting issues with it, and the Julie Lerman book highlights a number of hoops you need to jump through on complex datasets that simply shouldn’t be there.
So it’s back to basics. Linq, and then by definition Linq to Datasets, Linq to SQL (and eventually when it matures, Linq to Entities) is the path I’ve chosen. Linq to Datasets may well be considered legacy code, though suite-e uses them in a few places to retrieve large sets of data (converting stored proc –> objects for 45,000 rows proved too time costly), and I think it’ll be handy to start at this grass roots level.
I’m convinced by ORMs, and ideally would like to proceed with Entity Framework, but at least the above will give me a solid grounding that I can then proceed through to something like EF with limited pain. VS2010/C#4.0 apparently will have some updates, so I’ll keep monitoring.
On a separate note, I’m getting so heavily addicted to stackoverflow – I post where I can, but as a resource for learning it’s fantastic. You still have a number of weaknesses (people not answering the question, but posting fast to try to get points, downvotes for stupid reasons, etc.) but on the whole, it’s a cracking resource.
This month will see me probably post very little, we have 4 large client sites up for launch and 2 minor client updates, so I suspect the hours will be long and arduous, but we soldier on :)