There are following differences between ADO.NET and Entity Framework:
| ADO.NET | LINQ to SQL |
|---|---|
| It is a part of .NET Framework since .NET Framework 1.0 | It is a part of .NET Framework since .NET Framework 3.5 |
| SqlConnection/OleDbConnection is used for database connectivity. | We can use context for database connectivity. |
| Difficult to debug and cause syntax errors at run-time. | Easy to debug and cause syntax errors at compile-time. |
| It has full type checking at run-time and no IntelliSense support in Visual Studio, since it used the T-SQL to query the database. | It has full type checking at compile-time and IntelliSense support in Visual Studio, since it used the .NET Framework languages like C# and VB. |
| It used T-SQL to query the data to query the database and some other syntax for querying the other data source. | It used LINQ to query the data which provides the uniform programming model (means common query syntax) to query the various data sources. |