Home/ Questions/Q 921917
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-15T18:56:38+00:00

I need to choose carefully .NET ORM for N-tier application. That means, the I

  • 0

I need to choose carefully .NET ORM for N-tier application.
That means, the I will have the server (WCF service), which exposes the data, and client, which displays it.
The ORM should support all the related serialization issues smoothly – the objects or collections of objects, or whatever must travel across process boundaries. Ideally, the usage in multiprocess environment should be the same as in single process.

The criteria are:

  1. Flexibility of db schema mapping to objects (preferred)
  2. Ease of use
  3. Free, open source (preferred)
  4. Must be suitable for N-tier (multi-process multi-domain applications)
  5. Performance
  6. Tools to integrate with Visual Studio (preferred)
  7. Testability
  8. Adoption, availability of documentation
  9. Wide range of RDBMS supported (preferred; we are using MSSQL, but I wouldn’t like to be tied to it)
  10. DB agnostic – different DBs, same API
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would recommend Entity Framework v4. It has improved beyond dramatically since v1, and supports everything you require except being open source:

    1. EF supports a very wide variety of mappings, including TPH, TPT, and TPC. Supports POCO mapping, allowing you to keep your persistence logic separate from your domain.
    2. EF has extensive and excellent support for LINQ, providing easy to use, compile-time checked querying of your model. EF Futures components such as Code-Only simplify working with EF even more, providing a pure code, compile-time checked, fluent API for defining your model. By opting for convention over configuration, Code-Only can radically reduce your model design time, allowing you to get down to business without all the hassle of tinkering with a visual model and multiple XML mapping files.
    3. It is free as part of .NET 4. (Sorry, Open Source preference can’t be met here.)
    4. EF provides an excellent N-Tier solution OOB via self-tracking entities
    • Self-tracking information uses an open xml format to transfer tracking data, so tracking support could be added to non-.NET platforms
    1. Performance of EF v4 is very good, as extensive work was done on the query generator
    1. EF provides extremely rich visual design tools, and allows extensive customization of code generation via custom T4 templates and workflows
    2. EF v4 introduced numerous interfaces, including the IObjectSet<T> and IDbSet<T> interfaces, which greatly improve the unit testability of your custom contexts
    3. EF v4 is an integral part of .NET 4 and a central component of all of Microsofts current and future data initiatives. As a part of .NET, its documentation is quite extensive: MSDN, EFDesign Blog, ADO.NET Blog, dozens of .NET and Programming sites and blogs provide a tremendous amount of documentation and support for the platform.
    • 0