I have been monitoring the site
www.x-tensive.com for a while, waiting to see the new release of
DataObjects.NET because i have been looking for a very good ORM for .NET, something that would be better than
ADO.NET Entity Framework and better than
Developer Express XPO and better than CSLA by
Rockford Lhotka.
One of the main problems i found by using stored procedures (used by Lhotka) as part of the architecture is that they are very limited in the number of parameters they can take. Especially in MS SQL Server. The access speeds are not very impressive when working with forms which have to retrieve data from many tables. I'm not quite sure whether there where changes in the maximum number of parameters in SQL/S2008. i have not installed it yet.
The pricing of
DataObjects.NET is what shocked me. It goes for a hefty US$4,800 to release and its a once off price, no subscriptions, no contracts and updates are free. I read their documentation for 3.9 and downloded the Express Editions and it seems they have come up with a good product, but the price will not make it a very attractive product. What is the ROI of DataObjects?
The documentation for version 4.0 is still not yet complete and there are no demos yet, but some unit tests. The principles used
support .NET framework 3.0, so you can enjoy using your generics, delegates, type inference, anonymous methods, lazy computations, LINQ and others.
For more information see
http://blog.x-tensive.com/2008/09/dataobjectsnet-v40-is-released.html
i will need some performance benchmarks on the different ORMs. My other concern is security and usability with ASP.NET 2.0+ membership provider. I cannot wait to see the DO Petshop application. It would be nice to see some AJAX in it as well.
I will try it on some sample projects and will be back with some feedback.