Thank you very much for the reply Andrew. Turns out we had a consult session with Microsoft last week here are some items from my notes:

- EF may not be best for web applications. It can run out of memory doing something big. You don't want to load a lot of data into EF. It's not the best fit for short, "bursty" appications. It is also not best if you have to constantly go to the db for information.

- As far as LINQ goes, they mentioned that if you had contractors, this would keep them away from proprietary data. They indicated customers would use LINQ to talk to Entity Framework. You would also use LINQ if you don't want to go back to the database.

- Windows Communication Foundation was talked about as the preferable approach for our team (I know nothing about this and will be attending a class in November).

- They also talked about Velocity. It's primarily used at the UI level to store large amounts of data efficiently. Velocity is a private cloud and full API that's focused on in memory data.

All these technologies are completely new for me so I can't really speak to anything in more detail. This is just the best I could regurgitate from my notes! Our Dev Manager is recommending a WCF approach and I highly suspect LINQ and EF will not be coming into play with our projects at this point.

Thank you again!