So far in my .Net coding adventures I’ve only had a need to save information to files. So I’ve used XmlSerializer and DataContractSerializer to serialize attributed classes to XML files. My next project, however, requires that I save and retrieve information from a SQL server database. I’m wondering what my options are for doing this.
The current version of the app, which was not created by me, uses a lot of hard coded SQL commands. But now I’m trying to avoid doing anything where I have to read or write individual fields to or from the database or objects. I especially want to avoid a lot of hard coded SQL in my code. I like how the serializer classes just figure out how to read and write XML files based on the attributes and or public properties of the class. Is there something similar for a database rather then XML?
Object Relational Mapping
There are bunch of products out there, most notorious one being NHibernate, there are couple of competing products offered by Microsoft in Linq 2 Sql and Entity Framework (you’re supposed to use the later, but everyone uses the first as is waaaay simpler).
You can see a nice (although I suspect biased) comparison of ORM offerings at http://ormbattle.net/