OR Mapping tool

Question

I am using Tier Developer by alachisoft for OR Mapping .It is not effective as well as flexible.Please suggest me a mapping tool for dot net which is free/open source.It would be great if I get the nae of the most preffered tool.

Answer 1

NHibernate is a common, free, open source option. Subsonic is another option, which, though potentially less flexible, is much easier to use.

There are many non-open source options which are very feature rich. Some worth investigating include:

• Entity Framework (Free - included with .NET framework)
• LightSpeed (Commericial, but inexpensive, and very easy to use and feature rich)
• eXpress Persistant Objects (Commerical - very mature)

Answer 2

In no particular order:

• NHibernate
• Linq 2 Sql
• Subsonic

Answer 3

Check this ORM tools list you will find there all the most known .Net orm tools, and if its free or not.

Also if you searched on SO for ORM Tag you will find a lot of good questions and answers talking about the same issue.

Answer 4

NHibernate?
Linq (to sql)?
Subsonic?
doesn't Castle Project do something?

Answer 5

Entity Framework in .NET 3.5 SP1 is free.

Note that there are a major update on its way in .NET 4.0. You can find more information here : http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign

Answer 6

NetTiers is a very effective solution allowing Code Generation via CodeSmith. But CodeSmith is not free. Definitely worth checking it out for the range of features it provides, from DAL even to ASP.Net data bound controls.

Generally I have used it mostly for the Service Level features and easily accomodating database Updates during project development. It takes a bit of thought to incorporate it effectively into a solution to be able use MSBuild automation on a build machine.

Another alternative for ORM is Entity Framework (mentioned by Reed above) which I am currently using because of its Linq capabilities and the fact that it is Microsoft (which may be a requirement in some situations).

Answer 7

I highly recommend Linq to SQL. you can use native LINQ queries on your database like select customer from customers where customer.LastName == "Doe". It makes working with databases much easier (however i've heard that it's not "complete", however it should work for most uses). If you go this route, be sure to use SQLMetal for generating a Custom DataContext.

Answer 8

This question is asked a lot. Yesterday in fact:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1377236/nhibernate-entity-framework-active-records-or-linq2sql

(My answer to that question contains links to many of the other times this question has been asked and answered.)

NHibernate is the name of the most preferred tool.

Answer 9

ECO Would be my choice. Free up to 12 classes in the model.

Answer 10

I suggest Worm. Very fast and flexible. In addition it's open source.