There’s a follow up post.
I’m a little bit perplexed. Entity Framework 4.3 Beta 1 was just released. And there’s a sentence in the document that’s very interesting:
As soon as the next preview of the .NET Framework 4.5 is available we will be shipping EF 5.0 Beta 1, which will include all these new features.
Does it mean that the version that will ship with .NET Framework 4.5 (the next version in time of writing this post) is going to be 5.0? I still clearly recall the mess the second version with version number 4.0 created – a lot of people, on my trainings, talks, …, confused. What happened to clear versioning strategy?
I hope it’s just a small miss/typo and the version will be Entity Framework 4.5 and the following (additive) updates will be 4.5+n.
From http://semver.org/ :
> Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API.
“Won’t run on .NET 4.0 at all” is certainly a backwards-incompatible change!
Umm, so actually we should blame core .NET Framework team for bumping up only minor version.
Anyway. I think this a acceptable break of rule (because core team nailed the rules) and 4.5+n is IMO more understandable than 5.0+n (that will later probably mix with .NET Framework 5.0, if there will be such version).
I have tried to explain thigs more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/diego/archive/2012/01/15/why-entity-framework-vnext-will-be-ef5-and-nothing-else.aspx
Cool, I summarized it (to create more confusion, …, kidding, hope it will be clearer) here.