Despite some of the
negativity surrounding O/R Mappers, I've been wanting to give them a fair
chance to prove that they can help me do my job as a developer, so I've been in
wait-and-see mode. However, I have to give props to
LLBLGen Pro. I am really
liking what I see so far in that product. I'm still taking time to get familiar
with it and I will post more info later.
On a related topic, there's an interesting article on MSDN talking about
Custom Entities versus DataSet. I've been a big
fan of the DataSet class, specifically typed-DataSets. This is
probably due to some really
bad custom entities and collections I've had to support by folks not
familiar enough with the stateless nature of Web programming. Don't get me
wrong, there's plenty you can do with a
table module approach, but I'm starting to pull a 180 on this. Exposing
DataSets publicly is not good design IMHO, and I much prefer a rich object model
approach if possible. This is going to be even easier in ASP.NET 2.0 due to the
ObjectDataSource control. .NET is still a fairly new "technology" and we are
all still learning, and as such I guess opinions can easily change over time.
Like I've posted repeatedly: I'm always looking for good (or better) ways
to do things. :-)
