Is EasyObjects still relevant?

It has been a long and winding road…

EasyObjects was born on August 10, 2005. The Enterprise Library was still on version 1, having just released their second iteration and working towards a .NET 2.0 release. Visual Studio 2005 was out and about, but most people hadn’t adopted it quite yet. And the Entity Framework was just a twinkle in some Microsoft engineer’s eye (or maybe that engineer didn’t even work for Microsoft yet!).

Fast forward six years, and how has EasyObjects held up? Honestly, some good and some bad. Ok, mostly bad. Unable to invest either time or resources into the project, the code base has mostly stagnated. Sure, there have been occasional updates as Microsoft released new versions of the EntLib, but even those have stopped lately. And of course, Microsoft has officially entered the market with the Entity Framework. So how does a lowly open-source framework compete with a multi-billion dollar company?

Not all is lost, though. Where I have found EasyObjects to be the most helpful, is supporting old projects. I know, not the most glamorous role in the development world, but I believe it is an important role. After all, Microsoft is in the business of selling software licenses, and they would prefer that you don’t run SQL Server 2000 when they have a nice, shiny and new SQL Server 2008. And officially, you are out of luck if you want to use the Entity Framework with SQL 2000. And what about those .NET 1.1 sites you never migrated? Maybe a full migration just isn’t in your budget, but you need to add some quick and dirty features without re-plumbing the entire architecture… EasyObjects can help there. And the dynamic query syntax is the same, so you can move forward to .NET 2.0 (or higher!) without having to change up your data access code.

So is EasyObjects still relevant? The answer is yes, for now. In my next post I will discuss future plans and where EasyObjects goes from here.