Alternatives of persisting data using C#?

Question

I have a small application in C#, and so far I have implemented it using data persistence classes that are running SQL directly, I understand there are better alternatives as Hibernate.NET and possibly Spring.NET. There are some other I forget? pros and cons? thanks!

Answer 1

Here are a few of the more common ones:

• LINQ to SQL
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• NHibernate
• Plain old ADO.NET
• SubSonic

Spring.NET isn't really a dedicated data persistence framework. It's more of a IoC (Inversion of Control) framework, which gives you dependency injection, and a bunch of other stuff, including the ability to plug in a data persistence framework.

LINQ to SQL and SubSonic are probably the easiest to use and learn out of all of these. NHibernate and Entity Framework are more complex, but probably also more powerful and flexible than plain LINQ to SQL.