In my quest to speed up my development time, I had started looking into ORM type frameworks such as Persistor, NHibernate and Gentle.Net. I had previously chosen Gentle due to it’s price (FREE) and it’s relatively minimal configuration. I have still looked around at new things from time to time, but had pretty much stuck with Gentle. Recently I had started looking at SubSonic. SubSonic is a “Rails” inspired framework that builds a data access layer for you at compile time and places the generated classes into memory. It is a very smooth framework with a low bug count and it is also free and open source. Developed and distributed by Rob Conery, SubSonic has a good support structure in place and a growing community site as well.

Yesterday I was in the middle of working on a web service using ASP.Net 2.0, SQL 2000, and the Gentle.Net framework. I was having trouble trying to execute a simple query with Gentle and was not having a whole lot of luck. I tried going to the Gentle website only to find the server down due to maintenance. Not wanting top stop development, I decided to create a new project using SubSonic instead and just copy any necessary code from the old service to the new one. In about 15 minutes I was able to cover about 1.5 hours of work. I am amazed.

I started by copying the constructor and some of the configuration data from the old project to the new one. After that, I added the SubSonic configuration data, which happens to be a fraction of what was required for Gentle. Next I added the Builder.abp file and hit CTRL + Shift + B. I now had a strongly typed data access layer!

It is amazing how much development effort is reduced to get to the same result when using SubSonic. I’m going to finish evaluating it on this project and possibly start using it a little more often when the situation will allow….