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nhibernateormcodesmith.nettiers

ORM Tool - Crossroads?

Hi I seem to be at an ORM Tool crossroad and would like some advice of people who have faced a similar challenge. In the past I have been using CodeSmith with NetTiers Templates to generate my DAL all has been quite good, however I have decided to drop this for one reason or another.

So I am at a crossroads and have found the following:-

  1. I have looked at PLINQO (Linq to SQL) which seems to do a grand job however with Microsoft uncertain of Linq to SQL this may not be a good choice.
  2. Linq to Entities - This is still in its infancy and I may be wrong but people are complaining about the bloat and how Stored Procedures
  3. I have looked at nHibernate, this maybe the best choice but it seems to be a steep learning curve
  4. Ditto for LLblgen
  5. Subsonic - Not sure about this?
  6. Stick with the tried and tested NetTiers, forget the bloat, forget that you are forced to use the enterprise library, forget the dynamic sql it creates, forget that their is almost no activity on the forums, forget this and use it!

I already own Codesmith and do not wish to purchase anything else, the code generated must work in Medium Trust mode...

There may be others I have missed. I am looking for answers that explain why the ORM Tool is worth looking at.

Thanks Richard

Solution

  • I used .netTiers myself on the last project. but on the one I'm working at the moment we are trying Linq 2 Entities. You are right about Linq2EF not being mature. We do bitch about it all the time that's why we use T4 templates that generate code from the EDMX file. We also changed those templates so we have Business Objects, Interfaces for injection and DAL + DAO. We are happy to how it works now. The good thing is we can use LINQ against Entities.

    Otherwise I'd also suggest Fluent nHibernate (link) to you. It was one of the things we also considered. But you'll have to write lots of things on your own. It's not like you're used to in .netTiers where all the code gets generated for you.

    Since Subsonic 3 (link) is just about one week old I suggest you check it out. Based on what I've seen it looks very promising. And it uses T4, so you can slice&dice it to accommodate your needs.