The new entityframework ctp was released. The official statement is here.
It includes the designer, so I'm very curious how this fares against nHibernate! Congratz to the team!

The Devguy does a summary of the features. Read this hilarious piece:

• In previous CTPs the underlying provider connection was opened when the ObjectContext was constructed and held open for the life of the context—this would create issues, for instance, with databases where licensing was based on the number of concurrently open connections since the connection might be held open for an extended period of time—even when the connection is not being used.  The new model keeps the connection closed as much as possible while still appropriately dealing with transactions and avoiding promotion of those transactions from local to DTC where possible.

Really?

I mean, so, they now no longer keep the connection open all the time and instead have opted to close it when it's not in use..... because of licensing issues??

ROFL. I would think there are better reasons not to keep a connection open for too long, but that's just me.