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Asked: 2026-05-25T06:42:26+00:00

I’ve got a client who wants an ASP.NET MVC application. I’ll develop it with

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I’ve got a client who wants an ASP.NET MVC application. I’ll develop it with VS.NET 2010 Express, demo it to him on my Linux server during its development (Mono supports ASP.NET MVC), and he’ll eventually host it on a commercial provider running IIS.

Getting this done quickly is the name of the game. The only piece I’m missing here is the database layer. Ideally I’d use SQL CE and EF4. But SQL CE only works on Windows, and Mono doesn’t support the Entity Framework anyway.

The only free Linq to SQL-like option I see is DbLinq. A quick test with that on a MySQL database had it erroring out on a table that had two foreign keys to a single primary key. A search on Google shows that this bug was identified, and a patch was created, two years ago or so. That the patch still hasn’t been applied to the main source by now, and that this bug seems to affect so a common scenario, does not fill me with confidence on the production-readiness of DbLinq.

Even if it did work, it’d have to be with MySQL, as that’s the only database I can expect to be available on both Linux and an eventual Windows server. (SQLite, Berkeley DB, etc., would all require some native drivers be installed on the server, which I can’t count on.)

I don’t know NHibernate. But from what I read, it requires manually creating XML mapping files… so I don’t have to write SQL statements, but I do have to create mapping files? (Plus I’d need to learn how to use it.) Like I said above: Getting this done quickly is a goal here.

If I must, I will just pony up the $5 a month or so for a cheap ASP.NET hosting provider and use that to demo progress to the client, using SQL CE and EF4. But before I do that I’d just like to see if there are any other viable options. (It’s kind of mostly an intellectual exercise by this point.)

So… any tips?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You COULD try Linq-to-SQL. Partially supported under Mono from 2.6, it supports many dbs under mono Release Notes Mono 2.6 (they are working with those of DbLINQ to make it).

    Ah… Forget to learn quickly how to use nhibernate. It’s very good but it’s quite an hell. And creating the XML is the least (and with NHibernate 3.2 they have added their version of Fluent interfaces, so XML aren’t anymore necessary I think. You can “code” your XML.)

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