Some suggestions on which .NET ORM to look at learning

Question

I am a little ashamed to say that I have never used an ORM; as you may recall most of my career experience is hacking around with Classic ASP and the little .NET I do tends

Answer 1

SubSonic from Rob Connery is a "Swiss Army knife" ORM based on ActiveRecord. You can be productive with it in 30 minutes. Be warned, it is NOT at the level of NHibernate in terms configuration options, etc. It is hugely productive, and the code is very clean. We use it on most of our projects.

Answer 2

I would say go with NHibernate. It is widely used, has a number of tutorials and learning resources and an active contrib group. It is similar to Hibernate which means any skills you learn on the .NET NHibernate are portable to Java. Win-win-win-etc. :)

Answer 3

Checkout XmlDataMapper a simple free ORM (LGPL Licence) which leaves a low memory footprint compared to the other giants.
The sample project provided should be good enough to get started.

To integrate XmlDataMapper all you need to do is 4 little steps

1. Create a Business Entity / DTO for the tables
2. Create an XML File with the mapping information between the table and the DTO.
3. Specify the DTO and xml file in the configuration.
4. Just call the DTOConverter.Convert(dataReader) and other such methods to convert your database record to DTO / Business Entity