Yes indeed. And you're actually finding that MS is being (somewhat) more open in a number of areas. With their PRISM composite WPF guidance they went to some (not inconsiderable) effort to ensure that you could replace their UNITY IoC container with another of your choosing (Windsor, StructureMap, NInject, whatever).
And with the recently-released (alongside .NET 3.5 SP1) 'ASP.NET Dynamic Data' framework you are seeing the 'default' data-access strategy for that coming to the fore as being either EF or LINQ-to-SQL but they have also been quite open about developing and providing an ObjectCollection-based provider for ASP.NET Dynamic Data that's up on CodePlex now as part of the 'ASP.NET Dynamic Data Futures' components. This provider has been explicitly created so that adopters of ASP.NET Dynamic Data that don't what/need EF or LINQ-to- SQL can instead create Dynamic Data sites against anything that can return a collection of objects (like, for example, NHibernate <g>). Its way too soon to say that this represents any kind of sea-change in overall approach to the openness and extensibility of the frameworks that they release, but I actually think that the ALT.NET Vote-of-No- Confidence on EF and other similar feedback has helped MS realize that they aren't making friends in a number of influential thought-leading communities by developing things that are an all-or-nothing proposition and that they can gain more traction by complimenting other technologies out there rather than having to completely replace/ obsolete them with their efforts. Time will tell if this is an abberation or a trend, but I personally am somewhat hopeful. -Steve B. On Nov 24, 2:57 pm, James Kovacs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > S. Somasegar (aka Soma), Senior VP of Microsoft's DevDiv, had a recent > post about what is coming with .NET 4 and VS2010. > > http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/11/12/net-fx-4.aspx > > In it he writes: > > ... as well as end-to-end solutions for data validation from > declarative data on the database tier all the way through to the > client UI. You will be able to write validation logic once – have it > run anywhere and this framework will work with any data access layer > - the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, ADO.NET, nHibernate, etc. > > Note that in addition to Microsoft's own data access stacks, he > includes NHibernate. I thought that was pretty cool. > > James
