Personally, there are a couple of approaches I like:
1. TableAdapters - Check out Scott Guthries blog on this option, as he has
many nice entries. I was not sold on TableAdpaters until I tried them and
found they perform quite nicely. One negative, IMO, is the coupling of
config to the DAL (as it looks for specific connection strings); you will
see the same thing with the Enterprise Library.
2. Code Generated DAL - I am currently using .NET Tiers (a template librar
for CodeSmith) and enjoy it overall. I am still a bit more fond of LLBLGen
Pro. Both fully support 2.0 as of now, so either is a decent choice. In a
previous job, I experimented with Persistant DataSets (Last Component),
which showed a lot of promise, esp. with its flexibility on lazy loads, etc.
The main point I am making is there are plenty of tools that will speed up
your development effort. None of the tools mentioned here is incredibly
expensive and they will save you hours and hours of development time. If you
are a one-man shop, it might not seem worth it, but any business that has
developers hand code the DAL is wasting money.
--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA
*************************************************
Think outside of the box!
*************************************************
