Modular Application Design and LINQ, Is it possible?

Question

We are designing a large system and are using PLINQO for our data access. The problem doesn't lay in PLINQO but rather LINQ, I think. We want to make a modular design, ie possibly having multiple and different datacontexts. LINQ doesn't like this. Has anyone thought of a solution, issues or alternatives? Most things I see out there have one large dbml. We want more of one per unit of work, but they may need to access other data in other contexts. Is linq wrong for this?

Answer 1

I have no real experience with Linq besides having played with it a little bit (linq to sql). However, nowadays i use the devexpress persistence library, although it is a commercial one (and quite pricey) it works much better and much more intuitively for me compared to other persistency frameworks such as nhibernate.

Answer 2

If you are willing to write a bunch of code that sits on top of Linq2Sql, you can very likely do exactly what you want. It's a very non-trivial amount of work.

Linq2Sql is simplistic and not really intended for much more than basic ActiveRecord type work out of the box, but that doesn't mean you can't build quite a bit on top of it.

The question is, why would you go build advanced ORM features on top of Linq2Sql, when you could just instead use an ORM that already has those features?

When you say Linq, I assume you mean LinqToSql, since Linq is different than what you are talking about and I'm pretty sure Plinqo is a LinqToSql tool.