unit testing - TDD and ADO.NET Entity Framework

Question

I've been playing with ADO.NET Entity Framework lately, and I find that it suits my needs for a project I'm developing. I also find cool its non-invasive nature.

After generating a data model from an existing database you are faced with the task of integrating the generated model and your business logic. More specifically, I'm used to integration-test my classes that interact with the data store via mocks/stubs of the DAL interfaces. The problem is that you cannot do this using the ADO.NET Entity Framework because the entities it generates are simple classes with no interface.

The question is: how do I apply a TDD approach to the development of an application that uses ADO.NET Entity Framework? Is this even possible or should I migrate to another DAL-generation toolset?

Answer 1

One of the big critiques against the Entity Framework has been that it is inherently hard to test, for example in the ALT.Net Vote of No Confidence that gef quoted.

Here is a blog post discussing how to get around this, and be able to test your code without hitting the database, when using Entity Framework.

If testability is a big concern, you might want to look at another ORM framework, such as NHibernate, at least until Entity Framework 2.0 is released.