I have not looked at the Entity Framework, but have looked into and played with Linq to SQL. Linq to SQL does do some good things and, I think, another tool to add to the tool kit, but definitely not always the right tool. I think MS could have made it easier to to use sp's for CRUD with Linq although I am not sure how they could make it work with sp's for select because of the variety in selects. It is interesting as I have never granted table access, but may move toward that for selects.

We have to keep in mind that Linq is currently version 1, hopefully MS will get good feedback from us on it and improve it. We got SQL Server 2005 SP3, so if we find something with Linq that needs to be changed let them know.