Persistence frameworks

[Joe]

I was wondering if there are any recommended persistence frameworks for use
in .NET that could be recommended. I am looking for the following
requirements:

Free/Open Source or very inexpensive.
Ease of deployment (no services to install/straight dll)
Ability to define entity classes from existing schema and modify later.
support for database defined enumerations
1:1,1: many, many:many, bidirectional relationships
Transaction support
Either the ability to modify database schema directly from entity definition
or automatically modify entity definition from database schema

In the very nice to have but not necessary department:
Visual entity/relationship designer
object caching

I am imagining a code generator defining entity classes and persistence
methods based on an XML schema defined with a visual tool that has database
connectivity for either seeing updates to schema or to update the schema
directly.

NHibernate is close, but (as far as I know) it is missing a way to change
the data/object model in one place and have it reflected to the database or
application counterpart. Also the documentation is kind of patchy, and I'm
not a huge fan of the embedded XML resource file implementation. I think it
would do 90% of what I want it to do if I could find good, complete
documentation and 110% maybe with some helper tools.

 

[Nick Malik [Microsoft]]

what is wrong with using the persistence framework already in .Net? (It is
called Typed Datasets). It has most eveything that you asked for. I don't
think it has database defined enumerations (if by enumerations, you mean
user defined types). It does have most of the rest. As for updating the
system when the db changes, that is a manual process but quick. Visual
designer == Visual studio.

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=.net+typed+dataset

--
--- Nick Malik [Microsoft]
MCSD, CFPS, Certified Scrummaster
http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this forum are my own, and not
representative of my employer.
I do not answer questions on behalf of my employer. I'm just a
programmer helping programmers.