ORM, Microsoft and in between - The dilemmas

ORM conversations flood the web during the last months.

Microsoft new players (DLinq, ADO.NET entity framework) cause a lot of drama and “oh-ha” statements in our industry. Microsoft is playing around; They are throwing names all over the place (DLinq, LINQ for Sql, LINQ for simple scenarios, ADO.NET vNext, ADO.NET Entities, ADO.NET 3.0). I guess that the picture will become clearer in a few months as the minds behind this infrastructures will assemble and a new, solid infrastructure will take place. Just look at Remoting, WebSercies, Enterprise Services which assembled together into WCF.

This causes some old, damn good, questions to arise as well:

“Should I use Business Entities (Entity Info+ BL + DAL in the same class) or should I create a separate classes ?”

“Should I write my queries or ORM is good enough? I heard it’s somewhat slow, but I’m not sure…”

“Should I use ORM and map my entities with attributes or with xml? What is better ?”

“Which infrastructure to use? Is DLinq or ADO.Net solid ? Should I use NHibernate? “

etc…

I’m not going to answer these questions at the moment, but I’m certainly going to address them in the following months as my BL->DAL agenda started to shift from separate classes to Business Entities. I’m still doing a lot of prototypes to see the pros & cons.

In case you are interested to know the difference between DLinq and ADO.NET Entities (or ADO.NET vNext, you name it), here is a nice post to set your mind.

Oh, before I forget – It is time to make some good names to Microsoft products !
Why not calling ADO.NET vNext something like DARVIN (Data Access Revolutionary INfrastructure) ?
That’s cool !

Any thoughts ? names ?