[bytefish]

What usually happens in my experience is, that a home-grown Data Access Layer usually turns into a bad "ORM light", because materializing results is repetitive and tiring work. You want to abstract it away.

As a .NET developer I think EF Core has made the right call here, by allowing you to write SQL where it's needed and still use its infrastructure for all the tedious work of materializing your results.

Admittedly in 2014, the time the article was written at, I've also felt using OR-Mapper is a dead-end. But in 2026 the world isn't black and white.

[drdexebtjl]

I’ve had so many frustrations with EF Core.

I always inevitably want to model something in the domain in a way that is not be supported by EF. So I have to maintain EF DTOs and basically give up on the change tracker.