We are a small team working on a very tight deadline to develop a large web application in .NET. We are using multiple databases (one per client) so our requirements are slightly different than most applications. The databases will only be used for this particular application so it doesn’t matter if they are tightly coupled with the application. The main deciding factors are speed of development, long-term maintainability, and security. There are 3 options we are considering:
Option 1 – LINQ to SQL
None of us have any experience with LINQ, but we have been researching it and it seems like a good option and not too difficult to learn. Worth the risk of learning a new method on a tight deadline?
Option 2 – Stored Procedures
Seems like it could be a nightmare to maintain with the multiple database setup (or would it?) and it may slow down development to work in another environment as we don’t have a dedicated database developer. Basic CRUD queries would be generated by code generator which is an advantage.
Option 3 – Inline Queries
This method would be the fastest to develop but I know people are generally against hard-coded queries nowadays and I fear we may suffer in the long term with maintainability issues. Basic CRUD queries would be generated by code generator.
Please let me know if there are any factors we are missing. What solution seems the most appropriate for this project?
If you have a tight deadline don’t try something new. Ask the devs to study Entity Framework at home and in their spare time and try it in next project. Meanwhile do what you know best and have used in past successfully.
Inline queries are not bad if they are decoupled in a DAL assembly.