In all seriousness, the community is speaking out about EF because it recognizes that the way of designing and programming applications has evolved in favour of maintainability, agility, quality, and testing. The community could have simply ignored that fact that EF simply doesn't take that into account and will cause friction for those that will use it (in it's current state) and let people find out for themselves. But, the community is trying to communicate that these problems exist in EF and that it ignores the lessons learned from the .NET community and other communities.

The community has a problem with the fact that MS is going down the same path that other companies have gone down only to have a revolution when used in the wild due to failed projects and missed deadlines. We'd rather see a product that uses up-to-date principles rather than repeat history...

But, Peter, you use "the community" of [currenty and yes it will grow] 200+ people as though those who are signing the petition represent the entire .NET community. But they don't.

I'm part of the .NET community.

I've done what I could to influence v1 as well. It still has plenty of issues (in addition to those which are listed in the petition) but rather than try to tell people "don't use it!" I'm trying to explain when you might want to use it and when you might NOT want to use it (and I lean on what I learn from alt.net etc to help with that part). For those who are going to be using it, I'm doing my best to show them how and steer them around or over the pitfalls as well as understand how it works and why so they don't need a recipe book for how to do every little thing in EF.

The sky is not falling. It's just cloudy.

"the community" is a rat hole. You can't possibly expect any single thing to represent everyone in any community. Community falls apart if you expect every single person in that community to voice their agreement with something before it can be considered.

There's a heck of a lot more people saying EF needs to take into account industry standard principles involving designing and programming "entities" than there are people saying EF can be used with any existing enterprise-level application design that is entity-oriented. But, the group of people include many people that are Microsoft-designated representatives of the .NET community. The fact that any subset of a group has such and overwhelming and organized opinion about something designates it a community, especially when many of those in the group are designated leaders and experts by the same company producing EF.

The petition is reasonably clear; and under no certain terms suggests "the sky is falling" and by no means says "don't use it". And it does go on to detail generally accepted principles and practices of entity-based design and programming where EF falls short, and how. It would be quite easy for someone to read that document and make their own judgement whether EF is right for them or not.

"The community" is just trying to make more people aware of these issues so they don't have to find them out half-way through their development cycle because no one else was pointing these problems out, glossing over the problems, or are otherwise implicitly promoting EF for any entity-oriented software project. They want to make it clear for those who don't have the experience in entity-oriented design and don't know the lessons learned. It's these types of people who may stumble upon EF based on the positive-only content that some people and companies are proliferating only to end up running into one or more of the issues detailed in the petition (usually well into their development cycle).

It's scary that people are suggesting the issues aren't serious--either explicitly or implicitly--by associating them with Chicken Little. Many of these signatories have been down the very same route in other communities and are simply trying to help people learn from the mistakes of the past. For someone to belittle that by suggesting it's simply "the sky is falling" mentality is denigrating and inept, especially after they've read the petition. (those suggesting a group of Chicken Littles without reading the petition are simply ignorant)

I did read the petition, which I guess by your definition means I'm inept but not simply ignorant? Apparently one or the other since by not signing the petition, I'm not signing on to being "the best and the brightest". (I'm just kidding, take a chill pill).

No, I am not belittling the issues being raised or those who are signing the petition.

I am someone who takes time out of my presentations to be sure that people who are domain developers & TDD are aware that they will not like EF, that anyone who is a fan of nHibernate will probably really dislike EF and I spend time explaining some of the same points that are made in the petition. I have been criticized for doing this by the people who don't care (generally 95% of the audience) and even had evals at TechEd taking me to task for doing this, because in the entire room only ONE person raised their hand when I asked if there were any nHibernate users in the room. But I know it's important and I do it anyway. So I can do without the casting of stones.

But it's not an all or nothing scenario.

I just don't understand "our way is the only way and if you don't follow it then " well ... back to the choice between inept and ignorant..?