I started our first day at TechEd Berlin with a level 300 session about Entity Framework. A lot of great features were shown:
- N-Tier support(Self-tracking entities)
- Persistance Ignorance
- Code only
- Better design experience
- Model first
- T4 Template generation
- Lazy loading
- Better support for stored procedures
- Better support for SQL functions
- ...
Although I'm still a bit sceptical, I guess that this time it will be "usable" ;-)