Have you heard about LINQ (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2005/09/13/10501.aspx) ?

I've just come from Microsoft's TechDays Portugal where I attended a session about LINQ. The speaker told me Microsoft had killed its Objectspaces effort in favour of LINQ, which I can only describe as basically an ORM with the addition that the query language validity is checked at compile time. Actually, not quite an ORM, but something more generic, for which the support of Relational Databases comes as an (notorious) extension. It's still in the early stages but I've seen queries run fine. It depends on stuff such as Generics and Anonymous Classes (if I remember correctly?), and languages such as VB and C# would have extensions to support it.

There was a brief discussion about LINQ on our development list recently. Look through the archives and feel free to join. See http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nhibernate-development for information.

From what I can tell having skimmed over a few blogs written by people who are much more informed than me, Linq is sort of ORM-Lite. Nice for very basic usage, but will certainly not replace full-featured ORM tools. Paul Wilson's take: http://weblogs.asp.net/pwilson/archive/2005/09/15/425281.aspx

Of course Microsoft will try to benefit from the unique advantage of having the languages to manipulate as they please... It's kind of annoying to face the fact that they always have some advantage over the rest of the competition. Anyway, what I saw was too little, and too alpha, so I'm moving ahead with NHibernate for this new project I'm leading and not looking back.

I don't think any of the poll items would quantify my response.

My response would be that LINQ and DLINQ will provide a basic O/RM API that O/RM tools will be able to extend to support there specific features.

For example, DLINQ doesn't do inheritence mapping, it doesn't support interfaces, it doesn't support embedded types, lazy loading (?). Now, they may plan on doing some of these things but I think this is going to create more of an opportunity for more tools.

Some members of our design team are insisting that all NHibernate access be completely encapsulated by a proprietary data access "engine", substituting for HQL and essentially banning its use, on the expectation that DLINQ will kill NHibernate, and we'll switch over to it completely as soon as it's out of beta.

There is unfortunately much suspicion of 3rd party (i.e. non-Microsoft) tools, especially open source ones. Also, fear of LGPL projects switching to a GPL license and stranding us with a "dead" version. I can't see that happening ...

LINQ's just language extensions,

the real deal is here:

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.ph ... 30#2313930

NH is dying, no!