Question

I have a asp.net project and Its in designing phase. Its about products and shops navigation system. Users can browse/search products. I want my web application to be extendable and flexible.
What I initially planned was to make it an MVC and for database I propose ORM (Object Relational Mapping). Is that right? what could be the problems I face with this proposal. I am learning asp.net so I don’t know much about the problems.
What design do you people suggest?

Answer 1

It’s great that you’ve decided to learn ASP.NET.

Regarding design approach, it sounds like your question is 2 part: a) MVC or traditional web forms ASP.NET, and b) ORM or no ORM.

a) Generally speaking, if you have a good programming background, I would recommend MVC over web forms for any consumer facing Internet product. It promotes testability, clear separation of concerns, and gives the developer finer grained control over the UI.

b) Regarding ORM or no ORM – first, its important to note that you still need to choose a database. ORM is merely a means of abstracting the data access logic away from the developer – but there still needs to be a database to store the data. If you’re going with an all Microsoft stack, you’ll probably choose SQL Server.

ORM is great for developer productivity – and generally speaking, there’s no reason not to choose it for new projects unless you can identify up front that its not going to provide a productivity boost. An example reason why you would choose not to adopt ORM – you need to persist the data in a pre-defined format – or in an already existing database – and the persisted entities are not consistent with how your application is representing them (i.e. over-normalized). In this case, you may want to write your own data access logic, and not rely on an ORM.

Finally, if all you are looking to accomplish is putting a product catalog online, rather than building an application from scratch to do this – you may want to consider utilizing an existing CMS of some sort, or even use WordPress with some plugins. Would save hours of time and still accomplish your stated goal.

Best of luck!