Easiest to learn and use .NET ORM framework? [closed]

Question

Note: Anyone coming to this question now, mind the date. This question is nearly 4 years old and the information is relatively outdated. In my experience NHibernate now is relatively easy to use (with the fluent interface), Entity Framework is a legitimate contender, and MicroORMS such as Dapper and Massive are becoming quite popular.

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We are re-writing one of our core web applications and I finally got the all clear from management to replace the horrible tangle of stored procedures with an ORM framework for implementing our data access layer.

Hooray for me. Now I have to choose one.

I have played around a little bit with the following

• NHibernate
• Castle ActiveRecord (We would use it to power our DTO objects)
• Subsonic

Now I know that NHibernate is the true Alt.Netty choice but the problem is that I am working with contractors who as far as I know have never heard of it, and NHibernate has a reputation for quite a learning curve. Subsonic in the meantime seems like a far more straightforward approach. I also am aware of the Entities Framework but am wary of its 'meh' reception and Linq to Oracle but am wary of the fact that I've hardly heard anything about it.

So the questions are:

1. Are there any more frameworks I should be considering?
2. Which do you recommend for my situation?

Some more considerations:

• When I say I have a played around a bit with these frameworks, I mean it. I have configured them and used them to pull in some data to make sure it all works. That's the extent of it.
• This is an Oracle database (as you might have guessed from the inclusion of Linq2Oracle)
• Since this is a re-write, the database already exists and has a stable schema
• I am not too worried about performance. Our application usually serves at most a couple people at a time.
• You guys are the ones who are going to have to answer the torrent of questions I'm gonna have

I'm leaning toward Subsonic, but I'm curious what people might have to say.

Answer 1

Have you checked out Telerik's OpenAccess ORM? They recently acquired Vanatec and their ORM product. It supports multiple database platforms (including Oracle), LINQ support, forward & reverse mapping, is integrated with Visual Studio, and in my opinion (granted I am somewhat biased) is a suitable replacement for LINQ to SQL if that is the kind of "ease of use" you are looking for.