MVC3 app architecture - how to store data

Question

Goals:

• Be able to rapidly develop an application in MVC3
• Have validation in one place (ie probabaly the model)

where I already have a database

Question: What is your current toolchain of choice for this?

I've spiked out:

MvcScaffolding - http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2011/01/13/scaffold-your-aspnet-mvc-3-project-with-the-mvcscaffolding-package/

However this needs EF CTP5 if you use a model first strategy

Couldn't figure out how to get Validation (DataAnnotations) easily from the model eg a [Required] field

EF Model First - again DataAnnotations seemed hard. Entity Framework - DataAnnotations

LightSpeed - http://www.mindscapehq.com/ Current ORM of choice.

Answer 1

Here's my toolchain:

• ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor for the UI part
• NHibernate with FluentNHibernate for data access
• FluentValidation.NET for validation rules
• AutoMapper for mapping between the business models and the view models
• MVContrib

I also built a sample project structure using those frameworks.