ASP.NET MVC with Postgres; ORM recommendations?

Question

I'm project managing an intranet application being developed at work. We're in the early planning stages. I've previously done all my development in Python using Django, but as we're a windows shop we're probably going to go with ASP.NET MVC.

We won't really be able to afford a SQLServer license though, so we were perhaps looking into using Postgresql. However I can't seem to find many examples or guides for people who want to utilise a third party ORM - or at least, an ORM with similar usage as Django - that works with Postgresql.

Ultimately we'd like to handle authentication via Active Directory [including groups], but store actual content within the db.

There have been previous questions of a similar nature, but most of them are over a year old when MVC was stil in Beta.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

NHibernate by a country mile.

It also supports MySql and should you want to change it has the main commmercial ones too. Haven't switched between db vendors but if you don't do much bespoke t-sql and say use fluent nhibernate you could almost plug and play between database platforms.

The support and community behind NHibernate when it comes to Mvc is second to none. It is categorically the ORM of choice.

Answer 2

NHibernate supports PostgreSQL. See http://vampirebasic.blogspot.com/2009/02/nhibernate-with-postgresql.html for some advice on how to integrate the two.

Also worth mentioning is that NHibernate now supports LINQ syntax. See http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/07/26/nhibernate-linq-1.0-released.aspx for more details.

Answer 3

You can try DataObjects.Net - open source ORM with GPLv3 or commercial licenses. It also supports Postrges.

Answer 4

I'd recommend Mindscape LightSpeed. It supports PostgreSQL and has a visual designer baked into Visual Studio with full database round tripping to PostgreSQL.

When there was no add-in for Visual Studio to support PostgreSQL from the Server Explorer the guys wrote a free visual studio add-in for supporting it.

Solid O/R Mapper with LINQ mixed with first class visual model development against PostgreSQL. It is a commercial product however there is a free edition for small databases.

Mindscape LightSpeed O/R Mapper