Following on from yesterday, Frans Bouma MVP creator of LLBLGen Pro gave his long anticipated BOF (BOF003) session today on Object Relational (O/R) Mapping using .NET.
Most of the people attending were probably still in shock over the delay / cancellation of Objectspaces in .NET 2.0 and were looking to see what alternatives were available. In good honest tradition, Thomas Tomiczek MVP creator of EntityBroker gave everyone a taste of his personal debating style which was not dissimilar from his infamous online approach. Thomas however is one clever guy and made no mistakes in what he was saying. Meeting him in person and having in depth discussions with him afterwards made me realise that he is after all, one hell of a nice guy despite what your read in the newsgroups!
There was a consensus of confusion surrounding where exactly O/R mappers are required. Some advocated the use of hybrid systems (which I do not recommend) which combine O/R mapping layers with faster direct database access methods for read only operations. While this *might* achieve better performance, you have to way up the cost of loosing maintainability and database independence.
Well done Frans on a lively and rounded debate.