I am starting to delve into the realm of ORM, especially NHibernate, in developing applications with .NET support. I have to say that the learning curve is pretty steep and that a lot needs to be noted. Apparently, this actually changes the way you make data-oriented applications, the way coding, development, and almost everything.
In any case, I want to ask if you set some parameters when deciding whether to use USE or NOT USE ORM in your applications? How do you decide then an approach that should make it valuable to your organization?
The organization I'm working on now seems to have done a lot of SQL and Data Access functions working through the end, and I have to say that these class / methods / procedures have successfully completed their tasks of providing the necessary data and when necessary. I think it would be a tremendous effort to map some of this into ORM and get the same business value as the company over the past few years.
However, I know that ORM paves the way for applications to talk to database servers if they were implemented correctly. I must admit that I am in the training phase and that I may need all the help, resources and guidance for this transition. I also thought about buying a book from Manning, but I feel that with so many changes to NHibernate, the book may be a little outdated. Perhaps expecting the Packt book on NHibernate (May 2010 release) to help me get up and running better.
Please share your thoughts. By the way, if you could point me to a small sample web application that uses NHibernate + Visual Web Developer 2008 Express and SQL Server, that would be much appreciated.
Thank.