If you prefer to use Entity Framework, more power to you. After developing my SQL skills for years it just feels "odd" to give them up for what I consider minor convenience. I'm sure that this is some sort of holy war discussion that really, I'm not interested in participating in. Given that, there are some of us out here in the wild that don't want to use ORM's like Entity Framework (or any other for that matter, except of course Dapper). So when I found out that the new security model for ASP.NET called "ASP.NET Identity" had a dependency on EF, I needed a way to remove it.