I recently had a quick muck around with a few .NET ORM tools. I took a basic, contrived scenario and tried to implement the same operations using the tools. Here is a quick index:
- Messing around with SubSonic
- Messing around with NHibernate
- Messing around with LinqToSql
- Messing around with ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3
- Messing around with Castle ActiveRecord (added 8 Jan 2008)
The examples all go through same steps: the basic configuration required to get going, inserting a couple of records, and then getting some data back out with some simple queries, including traversing a many-to-many relationship.
8 Jan 2008: Quick clarification – this series is not intended as a review of these tools. It is simply a quick guide to configuring and performing some very basic operations with them. Because all the posts use a (very simple) common scenario, you may be able to draw some basic conclusions about the tools, but in the end you’ll probably have to evaluate them for yourself with respect to your own requirements. In which case these posts may help you get started :)