Does .NET have O/R Mapping?

[Elder Hyde]

I was reading this interview with Hejlsberg, when suddenly the
conversation turned to O/R mapping. Hejlsberg talked as if he had had to
design an O/R mapping for .NET (he said ".NET had each one of
those"--"those" representing, among others, O/R mapping).

Probably I'm missing something really obvious, but a google search only
gave me commercial O/R mapping tool! Is there any free O/R mapping tool
that comes with .NET?

Elder

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Elder,

Poking aroud on the Longhorn site, there are references to the
System.Data.ObjectSpaces namespace. From what I can tell, it will provide
the functionality that you are looking for.

The link is (watch for line wrap):

http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/ref/system.data.objectspaces.aspx

Given that this is in Longhorn, and Whidbey is being used for LH
development (the LH SDK bits required an Alpha of Whidbey), it is possible
that this will be included with Whidbey when released.

Hope this helps.

 

[Daniel Pratt]

Hi Elder,

I was reading this interview with Hejlsberg, when suddenly the
conversation turned to O/R mapping. Hejlsberg talked as if he had had to
design an O/R mapping for .NET (he said ".NET had each one of
those"--"those" representing, among others, O/R mapping).

Probably I'm missing something really obvious, but a google search only
gave me commercial O/R mapping tool! Is there any free O/R mapping tool
that comes with .NET?

Elder

He may have been referring to ObjectSpaces. ObjectSpaces has been in
development a long time, and it looks pretty good (imo). Unfortunately it's
to be included with Whidbey (next version of .NET frameworks), which means
it won't be generally available for a little while longer. In addition to
commercial offerings, there are a number of free, open-source O/R mappers
(many on sourceforge). Of the ones I've looked at, I like ojb-net the most:

http://ojb-net.sourceforge.net/

Regards,
Dan

 

[Frans Bouma]

I was reading this interview with Hejlsberg, when suddenly the
conversation turned to O/R mapping. Hejlsberg talked as if he had had to
design an O/R mapping for .NET (he said ".NET had each one of
those"--"those" representing, among others, O/R mapping).

Probably I'm missing something really obvious, but a google search only
gave me commercial O/R mapping tool! Is there any free O/R mapping tool
that comes with .NET?

No, MS will include objectspaces in .NET 2.0, coming Q4 2004.
Instead of offering a generic platform ala EJB-CMP or JDO, it will include
a specific mapper for Sqlserver which is non-intrusive as well so you'll
have to write a lot of code yourself before you can use it in a lot of
scenario's (complex databinding for example).

At the moment you can check out commercial O/R mappers which offer
more functionality than Objectspaces will and a few Open source ones.
Neither of the open source mappers are really productive though, they all
require you to invest a lot of time in the mapping configuration and
maintenance which can be a pain...

FB