LLBLGen Pro

To answer a comment from my post on CRUD a few days, I'd suggest a look at LLBLGen Pro.



The name might not be so hot, but it's the best tool I've used in several years of looking for .NET data access. It's a complete object-relational mapping tool that dynamically generates SQL against the database of your choice. Though it's currently limited to SQL Server, Oracle, Firebird and Interbase, I believe MySQL and DB2 drivers are in the works.

One potential problem for some people will be the use of dynamic SQL instead of stored procedures. I used to be in the SP-only camp, but I've definitely come around to the other point of view due to the supreme ugliness of maintaining stored procedures. There is nothing worse that going into a project where a lot of the business logic is written in Transact-SQL or PL/SQL.

So check it out. At this point in the software development world we don't need to be spending time on code that sets up parameters to a stored procedure, calls the stored procedure, and then maps the values returned from the procedure to an object. We can generate that. Since we're all moving to SOA anyway we need to consider this sort of programming as low level as we do hash tables and linked lists now.