Entity Framework is one of my Micrsoft's new recommended ways to build a data access layer. It provides a lot of flexibility in allowing you to control your database model, easily update your model, and automatically generates a wrapper on your database model so that you can access all of your tables as objects (called Entities).

Although stored procedures may be on their way out (see post here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216569/are-the-days-of-the-stored-procedure-numbered), they are still supported in Entity Framework and can be used relatively easily. There are many tutorials on how to use a stored procedure in the Entity Framework to return a set of data and bind it to an Entity. But I had a little more trouble figuring out how to call a stored procedure that returns a scalar value.

Why does Microsoft assume that we want to combine our business, data access, service, and web layers together in a single web project? Without sounding too much like a rant here, take a look at almost ALL of Brad Abrams (former Microsoft Architect for WCF RIA Services and Entity Framework) posted examples of how to use the Entity Framework with RIA Services. They all have the Entities, RIA Services, and pretty much all of the other data logic included in the Web Application project.