The Entity Framework has been valuable to me since it came out, because it provided a convenient and powerful way to model against my data source in a consistent way. The first versions had some deficiencies that for me mostly fell in the category of the tight coupling between the model and its resulting object classes (entities). Version 4 of the Entity Framework pretty much solves this with the support of T4 templates that allow you to implement your entities as self-tracking entities, plain old ......