The last thing I will compare in this round of Battle of the ORM’s is how NHibernate and the Entity Framework handle persistence. So first of all I want to vent one of my pet peeves, which is the myth of persistence ignorence.

Persistence ignorence is a term used to describe a persistence mecanism that does not contaminate the domain model and hence the business logic. This means that the model can be ignorent of how it is stored and not contain detals about the datastore. I think this a very important design goal to strive for, however actually obtaining true ignorence is a myth and something no ORM is even close to achieving.

This week I went with two colleagues to get certified in using the PreCom framework, which is developed by Pocket Mobile. So we spent two days at Vertica office in Ballerup, learning about the API and how to install and configure a PDA to run PreCom.

What is PreCom?

The PreCom framework consists of 5 building blocks on top of the Compact Framework. In decending order of importance they are: communication, storage, updates , logging  and hardware.

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Today the 9th of December I spend the day in Copenhagen attending the sitecore partner seminar as well as a technical deep dive of sitecore’s e-commerce offerings. We just recently became partners, so we were interested in what the roadmap is as well as what the commerce modules offer.

First part - should have worn a tie

The partner seminar started with a "what’s new and cool" segment. As usual these things are targeted towards sales people, so as a developer I thought it was very superficial and all about shiny features and buzzwords to be honest. What I did take away from it was that there is done quite a bit of work on streamlining and performance. To be fair I missed the first part because my train was delayed - big surprise for DSB that it has been snowing apparently.

Online Marketing Suite or OMS is the module everyone likes to talk about at these things, and it will be enhanced with a number of wizards and a dashboard, as well as marketing automation designers written in Silverlight. This seemed very nice, and will help in multichannel orchestration, which is increasingly important these days.

The "Massive" data architecture was the last big thing that was talked about. The idea is that data is moved into Azure data storage where the key-value nature of the database is abstracted away by a LINQ based API that sitecore will provide. This will include the possibility to do transactional publishing and it will be backward compatible, so existing solutions can be moved. A big focus was web 3.0 and the semantic web – basically being able to associate meaning to relationships.

I warned you - it is very superficial and what is really behind these words I can only guess about until I get my hands dirty.

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In the previous Battle of the ORM's post I looked at setting up and configuring NHibernate and Entity Framework. So the next step is to get down to business and look at querying - the most important part of an ORM.

Gimme gimme gimme

First I need to address that the Entity Framework CTP5 has been released. This means that some more features have been added, which you can read about on Scott Guthries blog. Besides that there are some classes that have been renamed, which actually makes my last post mildly obsolete already. The renaming means that the Database class now is called DbDatabase – apparently redundancy is the new black – and that the databaseinitializer classes are called CreateDatabaseIfNotExists, DropCreateDatabaseAlways and DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges.

These days most developers use LINQ, myself included, but a very common issue is that not all LINQ implementations are created equal. Actually the reason I started this whole comparison project, was because I have been using an NHibernate 2.x, where LINQ to NHibernate was a seperate project - and suffice to say I have had my share of fights with it. Now it has been "baked in", and it has taken a pretty big leap forward.

Following up on my last post and on reading NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook I decided to download the latest NHibernate bits (v. 3 CR1), and do a comparison to Microsofts Entity Framework.
NHibernate and Entity Framework are what most developers reguard as the top Object Relational Mappers out there. So looking at how they stack up is pretty important in order to be able to choose the right ORM for a given project.

Hvad kunne være mere i julens ånd, end at have mulighed for at hjælpe en stakkels gadget hungrende med-nørd I denne svære tid? Jeg kan i hvert fald mærke at jeg allerede er kommet i julehumør over at se de mange svar, hvor nogen af dem endda har været uforudset kreative.

Det rigtige svar på spørgsmålet som 83 deltagere i alt har svaret på er kort og godt: "Don't call us, we'll call you!". De mest kreative har endda sendt en video med svaret.

Den eneste naturlige måde at finde vinderen på har naturligvis været at afvikle: new Random().Next(83); for at finde indexet på vinderen i listen af mailadresser.

Og vinderen af en WD TV HD Live Digital Box er: Jørgen Christensen