"No built-in ActiveRecord-like ORM mapper in .NET"

I’m primarily a .Net developer, and this book looks really interesting. But I have to take exception with the following quote in section 6.1 of the chapter: Displaying a Grid of Data in a Table>

“There’s no built-in ActiveRecord-like ORM mapper in .NET, although there are several open-source and commercial packages that are similar in style and function.”

It goes on to say with .Net out of the box you have to use sproc’s or SQL. What about LINQ to SQL? We’re using that extensively on my current project with great success. And all of it’s biggest limitations (like no multi-table inheritence and only working with SQL Server) should be resolved in the forthcoming LINQ to Entities. In fact the entire chapter seems to use an out of date way of connecting controls to databases.

In any event I’m afraid this book will do the .Net community a disservice if it doesn’t at least mention LINQ, if not (ideally) rewrite all examples and comparisons to use LINQ.

Furthermore, I feel there should be a significant part of the book comparing Rails to the forthcoming .Net MVC Framework, which looks very awesome and really exciting. This book could catch a wave of excitement and readership among the .Net community and could really excite developers like myself if it could extensively compare .Net MVC Framework to Rails and then time the books release with the MVC Framework’s release.

But maybe the book is intended for an audience slightly beyond the bleeding (or even cutting if you ask me) edge. Just a thought.

Thanks for your comment, Lee. You’re right that we didn’t mention LINQ in this particular instance, although we do talk about and have plenty of code samples using LINQ in other parts of the book. I’ll be sure to make a reference to it here before the book is published.

In regards to ASP.NET MVC, we do talk about it and compare/contrast with Rails in the book, although our discussion of it is limited. We’ve been writing this book for about 10 months, and during that time, ASP.NET MVC has been (and still is) in Beta/CTP. We’ve done our best to keep up with its development, but in the end, we chose to focus on comparing Rails to technologies which are already production-quality and are in the hands of the greatest number of .NET devs.

Thanks for the clarification and prompt response. I’m glad that section was the exception and not the rule. I’m definitely looking forward to publication. It should be a very interesting read.