SubSonic

Like a lot of people, writing Data Access Layers is not something I really want to spend a lot of time doing. Thankfully there are a vast number of ways that you can improve the process, ORM's and code generators are the two basic methods of assisting in this fashion. Many will be familiar with Hibernate (and its .Net equivalent), possibly the most popular ORM on the market. I quiet like it, but it’s fiddly and config heavy in terms of mapping files. You can Generate these thanks to product like MyGeneration but it often requires tweaking. once its up and running it really is a nice way to deal with persistence for very OO based applications. The other option I have used is Codesmith with it NetTiers templates. Well, up until finding Subsonic. It (so far) has been great.
What I like:

• Can have the benefits of SP’s and ORM


• Can set it to generate the code at build time, so you know every time you run it it is synched with the data base


• If you don’t like the generate on build option you can easily generate the class files for the DAL as well as the create scripts for DB including data, all from with in VS (great for Source control!)


• Author(s) seem to be very proactive in their support and maintenance


• Can be used with in VS as an external tool, meaning one click generation from within VS.


• Minimal additional config settings


• Video showing you how to do it.


• Its pretty fast

I last ran into Subsonic when it was ActionPack. Being happy with Codesmith I didn’t really follow it up. However, as I no longer have a license for CodeSmith, SubSonic being OSS is looking a lot nicer :)
No doubt as I continue to play with it I will find features and bugs, but so far so good.