When NOT to use the Entity Framework

Question

I have been playing around with the EF to see what it can handle. Also many articles and posts explain the various scenarios in which the EF can be used, however if miss the

Answer 1

One potentially big issue: Entity Framework 1.0 does not support persistence ignorance. This means that your business layer has a dependency on your data access layer.

If your entire application will be hosted in the same process (like a website on IIS) then this is no problem.

If, however, you have a need to remote your entities (to a Silverlight or Windows Mobile client for example), then your entities will not easily serialize across the wire. You will have to create separate data transfer classes to send your entities across the wire, and additional logic to marshal data between your entity classes and the DTOs.

Edit: spelling.