Question

I am in process of evaluating ORM first time. Please suggest which one i should choose for my next project.

I wrote couple of sample code with EF 4.1 code first. Before start same exercise with Nhibernate, I want to know if somebody have already experience with both in production application.

My evaluating criteria

1. Speed of database access
2. Learning curve (because I am new to ORM)
3. Community support
4. Tutorial/Books availability
5. Anything else which I should consider (Because I am noob to ORM)

I wish if people who have experience with both the ORM in production level app answer my question.

Thanks in advance!!!

I am aware that this question may be a little bit dangerous to ask 😉

Answer 1

If you are a noob to ORM and only need the basic features you may find the Entity Framework and Nhibernate are over kill and should be looking at a light weight one like Massive:

https://github.com/robconery/massive

That said there are two main issues you face with EF vs NH

1. EF is all that microsoft support and so all their tooling by default uses EF. Making beginner code easier with EF.
2. NHibernate is more mature and has a greater feature set (if you need it) also has a good development community and lots of blog info about it.

I would choose Massive if you want simple / fast but unsupported, EF if you want easy and MS support but limited in some ways, or NHibernate if you have the time to learn a proper ORM.

Hope this helps.