I am working on a personal side project that will utilize a complex and large relational database. During the design of the database I had some co-workers give advice to how I should approach my application; they advised to use the entity framework.
From what I've read and what I am watching it sounds like the entity framework is the right tool for the job. However what I have come to programmer.stackexchange for is to ask whether or not somebody who has just going going in their career should do.
Let me rephrase; I have 3 years web design / development experience (html/css/js/php/mysql) and now about 1 year experience with actual software engineering C#/VB. So the question is should I utilize the entity framework or should I build this rather complex and ambitious project without the entity framework; ergo building all the SQL that will handle massive amounts of relational data?
The reason why I ask is because I want to get the most ROI (knowledge and experience) from the project.