In the last two weeks my development team has made a few new discoveries in the area .Net ORM tools. The new additions are Sub Sonic (free) and Entity Spaces (paid - $80).
We are in the process of evaluating and prototyping both of these tools for a enterprise sized web-application that we are about to start building. The team discovered these after struggling to implement the much talked about NHibernate ORM framework.
Both Sub Sonic and Entity Spaces are extremely easy to implement. You are not required to construct XML mapping files required to map classes to the database. These classes are auto generated by the tools themselves. Once this process has finished you are two lines of code away from populating data into your Views. Another great advantage of these tools is that they both support scaffolding.
We will keep you updated with developments of our hunt to find the ORM best suited to our upcoming development. We will also post some more technical articles with example code once we have further prototyped and researched the tools. What has been your experience with implementing .Net ORM’s?
Read more about some of the pro’s and con’s of Sub Sonic and Entity Spaces on Kevin Southworth’s blog.
If you want to check out a really different approach have a look at Persistor.NET. This tool supports object oriented modelling without any compromises - including all .NET Framework classes. The database schema and its access is generated automatically - on the fly.
You can’t use Persistor.NET if you want to build your application on an already existing database.
Save objects simply!
Hans-Peter
Developer of Persistor.NET
I am quite excited and overwhelmed by these products, especially after watching the online videos.
First, I tried and tested SubSonic - which I found was the most usable and straight forward. Though SubSonic ( http://www.subsonicproject.com/ ) had great potential, my research discovered a large problem. It currently doesn’t support joins ( left joins etc.., or at least I haven’t found out how to use it) which leads me to conclude that though this product has great potential, it still needs some work and especially from the perspective of what we will be needing it for (large project with high stakes). SubSonic’s site promises the addition of joins, but we all know that could mean on ETA of anything between today and never.
Then EnitySpaces ( http://www.entityspaces.net/ )… I did the research and watched videos. I found this product just as good as SubSonic, though some of the videos don’t give every step and skipped a few critical things. I have managed to work around the “unknowns”. EntitySpaces is not as usable and straight forward as SubSonic, however it supports “joins”. I am still busy researching this product as of now seeing that I haven’t got it working 100% yet. Hopefully soon I will open this products’ full potential. I’ll keep you posted on this…
About Persistor ( http://www.persistor.net/ ). I presume this is a new product. I have seen the demo, and doesn’t show much. Maybe because it’s express version (Not sure). The tutorial is very limited in explaining where the Object Model comes in or how to go about using it. The support also doesn’t really say much, just seems like FAQ’s support. I looked at demo code which I came across which seems to indicate that you have to build your own object model. This is acceptable but time consuming. SubSonic and EntitySpaces generate it all for you… The other downfall I find is that you can’t use this product on exsiting databases, which is a big downfall, especially for older projects for example, where developers would like to improve their existing way of using database packages and functionality.
If anyone out there has some pointers, I’d appreciate hearing from you…
Marco
I am also researching .NET ORM tools for an enterprise application. We started searching from Nhibernate vs. DLINQ. The result was not very clear but acceptable:D
I suggest you to read the article from related to this topic from http://www.howtoselectguides.com/dotnet/ormapping/
in the chart, some of the informations are old. But after updating those fields we found 3 big nominees DataBlock, Wilson Or Mapper and LLBLGen.
LLBLGen seems perfect enough both for creating entity classes and xml generation.
Documentation is good and there is a book full of examples which is a really good documentation for LLBLGen (except propogandas:) against stps) you can access the book from http://www.lulu.com/content/174470
DevForce Enterprise is a comprehensive platform that enables enterprise .NET development and deployment for n-tier environments. The DevForce Enterprise framework provides sophisticated object persistence, client-side caching, advanced data binding, business rule validation, support for offline/disconnected operations, and support for publishing and consuming Web Services, among its many features. DevForce Enterprise also includes the Business Object Server (BOS), an application server that provides scalability, security, and enables n-tier deployment of .NET applications across the internet.