Jason Mauss has done an insanely good job of comparing Object-Relational mapping tools for .NET. I am most interested in trying NHibernate in conjunction with the Castle ActiveRecord implementation.
Don’t miss the feature comparison table included in the guide.
Glad you liked the O/R Mapper Guide. There were a whole bunch of guides written, unfortunately several of them haven’t been published yet.
I made it through the Castle ActiveRecord and NHibernate tutorials tonight. I am very impressed with Castle ActiveRecord. It seems like an excellent way for us c# guys to get a taste of Ruby style RAD.
Another good find was MyGeneration, a code generator that will do NHibernate XML mapping files. Though, I think I will try and do a custom generator for Castle ActiveRecord classes.
I spent more time today with Castle ActiveRecord – and I am pretty pleased with it. It took some time to get all of my attributes set right, and there are a couple additional steps for strongly typed collections. However it feels stable and predictable enough that I won’t have to create a DAL layer and sprocs – at least until performance becomes an issue.
If Microsoft doesn’t jump on the bandwagon and implement their own version of ActiveRecord, I may have to become more involved in the Castle project – I think it’s cool.