This is probably a long shot.
In the .NET world, has anyone found an ORM (Commercial or Open) that has the flexibility of NHibernate to support domain driven design with good Linq support? Linq to sql is dead, Entity Framework doesnt yet support POCO's, lazy load or object first development very well, and none of the old stand bys such as LLBLGen seem to either.
Anyone find anything new and exciting in the ORM market?
Thanks!
No, I don't know of any. Because NHibernate is popular and very good at what it does, and EF is likely to pick up most of the remainder (particularly devs that don't want to stray from Microsoft-supplied frameworks), the barrier to entry for a new player is very high. Another ORM would need to add something significant over and above what NHibernate currently offers in order to get any reasonable level of interest.
If there was an open source project that wanted to deliver better Linq support in an ORM, in my opinion it would have greater success contributing to NHibernate Linq rather than attempting to build its own framework from scratch.
Which version of the .NET Framework are you talking about? 3.5? 4.0?
There are quite a few ORMs out there and some of the commercial ones may in fact meet your needs (or be working on new releases that meet your needs). Competing against both NHibernate and Entity Framework from a commercial perspective is pretty daunting. Microsoft made it much harder than necessary to write a Linq provider, which is why so few ORMs have one. Writing a domain driven design oriented ORM that supports multiple database vendors is also a pretty steep hill to climb.
NHibernate certainly has all the momentum right now, but that doesn't mean it's invincible. It's hard to compete with free & open source software that has a multi-year head start, even for a company with the financial resources of Microsoft.
I think you may just need to be patient. NHibernate's Linq provider is improving and the other ORM vendors are working hard on improving their offerings as well. Things could change significantly in the next two years or so.
See ORMBattle.NET - it won't exactly answer your question (btw, I hardly admit this is possible), but there is some info on quality of LINQ support.
Note (or disclaimer): I'm one of persons related to creation of ORMBattle.NET, as well as one of DataObjects.Net authors.
I wouldn't call it a "NHibernate killer", but SubSonic works well. It's simple to use, allows you to choose between using the Active Record pattern and the Repository pattern. It supports POCOs, lets you use object-first development and setting up lazy-loading is easy enough.