title: design advice : Entity Framework useful with stored procedures?
body: <p>I am new to .NET and early in the design process of a front-end application for a database, and looking for some advice.</p>
  
  <p>I am not sure I get it...</p>
  
  <p>The DB is very strongly normalized, but provides lots of stored procedures to abstract the logical model (ex. Select sproc returns one data set from multiple tables closely reflecting the business object, Insert/Update sprocs to multiple tables, etc..)</p>
  
  <p>How should I design the DAL ?
  I'm not sure what the benefit of the Entity Framework is in this context.
  When generated, it reflects the normalized DB schema rather than an abstraction of it. 
  Or if I map the sprocs to generate it (which requires some work since the T-SQL in the sprocs is dynamic and with joins), I get the business objects alright but can't see the benefit of it : the entities represent to a single 'abstract' table, and not a set of entities with Datarelations, the sprocs handles the calls to multiple tables. It seems more work to map the generated change events to the sprocs than to call the sprocs directly.</p>
  
  <p>What am I missing ?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,</p>
  
  <p>Michael.</p>