Whidbey has a pretty cool new feature being developed called “ObjectSpaces, which is an O/R (object/relational) mapping tool that leverages ADO.NET. For all of you “DAL lovers“ out there (and I've seen a billion DAL designs and everyone who designs them is always the best - haha), ObjectSpaces is an abstraction between tiers for when you need to read/write (specifically, an object model) to different data sources.
As a word of great caution for those of you (and you probably don't know who you are) who over-architect the snot out projects, Dino Espisito writes the following:
The bottom line is that an approach based on objects is elegant and neat on paper, but may consume significant time in reality if you have to write it from scratch. However, when large applications are involved that manage tightly interrelated, hierarchical data, thinking in terms of objects is terribly helpful and often it represents your only safe way out. For this reason, Object/Relational Mapping (O/RM) tools have existed for a long time, and from several vendors. An O/RM system allows you to persist an existing object model to a given storage medium. You should use an O/RM system because you have an object model to persist. You shouldn't create an object model in order to use an O/RM system.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnadonet/html/objectspaces.asp
