Besides ASP.NET MVC's obvious conventions, what libraries do you take advantage of that minimize boot strapping, mapping objects, data access and such? I want to spend more energy developing domain logic as opposed to dealing with the details of object persistence (for example).
I have used StructureMap and NHibernate in the past to great effect. Are there other tools or other libraries I should consider that further streamline the process?
You can write own core of project using:
that like you want or simply use one:
Sure MS Entity Framework. It's official part of .NET and in version 4 (RTM comes with .NET 4.0 in April) supports secondary keys and using UDF as part of LINQ sequence run on server side. And sure, is supported by Visual Studio .NET.
You can check out this example: http://whocanhelpme.codeplex.com/ (it is based on S#arp Architecture framework). I haven't actually tried it but I do use a lot of the mentioned libraries myself, and it got very good feedback in S#arp google groups.
We are very, very happy users of Autofac, NHibernate + FluentNHibernate :-) But to switch from StructureMap to Autofac or vice verca does not make difference. One of the next libraries I like to check out is AutoMapper.
FluentNHibernate + Schema generation is very worthwhile.