Scot ALT.NET – ORM Evening

I had the pleasure of attending my first meeting of the Scottish ALT.NET community last Thursday.

It was an interesting and informative experience around the use of ORMs to assist with .NET development. NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate were presented, then subsequently we were treated to a smackdown of NHibernate vs Microsoft Entity Framework.

Although the comparison of the two frameworks was more geared around the features and usability, I myself can’t get away from the database first approach that stems from being taught Codd’s rules at university. Why would we use a relational database if we’re going to be primarily concerned with making our data model map to our object model? I feel a good software system is born of a good data model.

Tooling should be used to take away any repetitive tasks, which are both boring and error prone but it should not take away the need to have a good working knowledge of all the components of your technology stack.

It’s also plainly clear that right now, the Entity Framework cannot be taken seriously. Maybe v4.0 with VS2010 will change this, but I remain to be convinced.

To this end, I will be sticking with technologies such as Linq to SQL or CRUD stored procedures coupled with template based code generation.