Opinions about ORMs vary widely. Some see it as an essential tool for simplifying data access while others claim it greatly increases complexity while robbing applications of much needed performance. Sam Saffron and Rob Conery have found a middle ground in what’s known as a Micro ORM.
Using the new DLR features in VB 10 and C# 4 you can build a configuration-free ORM that works well with legacy stored procedures. Though accessed using normal object-dot-property syntax, all the data objects are built at runtime based solely on the information returned by the database. And this is done with no interfaces to define, classes to implement, or data mapping definitions to write.
FluentData is a new introduction to the micro-ORM family that aims to be more straightforward to use than full ORMs like NHibernate and Entity Framework. It uses a fluent API and supports SQL Server, SQL Azure, Oracle, and MySQL.
A simple ORM used in StackOverflow titled Dapper.Net was recently released on code.google.com. This ORM specializes in fast generation of objects from SQL query results. Dapper.Net supports mapping query results to a strongly typed list or a list of dynamic objects. The ORM is a single file of less than 500 lines of C# code and is available under the Apache 2.0 License.
