It occurs to me that state control in languages like C# is not well supported.
By this, I mean, it is left upto the programmer to manage the state of in-memory objects. A common use-case is that instance variables in the domain-model are copies of information residing in persistent storage (i.e. the database). Clearly this violates the single point of authority principle, and "synchronisation" has to be managed by the developer.
I envisage a system where instead of instance variables, we have simple public access/mutator methods marked with attributes that link them to the database, and where reads and writes are mediated by a framework that decides whether to hit the database. Does such a system exist?
Am I completely missing the point, or is there some truth to this idea?
If i understand correctly what you want: Any OR-Mapper with Lazy Loading is working this way. For example i use Genome and there every entity is a pure proxy and you have quite much influence to tell the OR-Mapper how to cache the fields.