LLBLGEN Pro and EF4 ORMs comparison

New year - new startup :) We are chosing ORM. I personally worked with LLBLGEN last years. I've looked through EF4 today and have found that its functionality is close to llblgen. (filtering, sorting, grouping, working with stored procedures and functions, working with graphs of objects (prefetch path), lazyLoad).

I know that llblgen doesn't support POCO, that means that it is required to write additional (or more complex) code to decouple it from Domain.

I don't think that llblgen license is con as llblgen is real successful alternative to Microsoft's orms and it is cool that we have such alternatives.

I didn't find any concrete compari开发者_开发问答son of these orms in stackoverflow. Just something like "If it is not critical to pay maney then use llblgen" :).

So I just want to list pros and cons of LLBLGEN and EF4. (ORMs functionality only without designers features)

I have used LLB on several projects over the last few years and I am just finishing off my first EF4 project. Both are perfectly fine for simple 1-1 mappings between objects-tables. Doubtless other people would disagree, but for projects where I use codegen I try and keep that the case as far as possible. I'm no EF4 expert, so theres probably things it can do that I've not discovered yet but I feel that LLB is a more mature product and the support is absolutely fantastic. Surprisingly enough getting help on EF4 is nowhere near as easy and googling for the answers can be difficult because you end up with loads of unrelated C# hits. The LLB forums tend to give you detailed answers to your code snippets very quickly - normally within hours.

But MS being the huge beast that it is I had to give EF4 a try on a project, and things have worked out fine. But personally I still prefer LLB.

Pro for LLBLGen - support. Very responsive support forum with issues typically fixed in a day or 2 (or sometimes hours)

Try getting that level of support for EF (or any other ORM come to that !)

Ok guys. Let me summarize my question after studying EF4.

1. It is possible to use EF4 with POCO objects that is good if you are working with Domain model. LLB doesn't support POCO.

2. LLB entities has state even without dataContext (Adapter scenario). It means that you can get entity in one context and save it in another and second context will know that entity is not new. EF4 will treat it as new Entity and it is require to write additional code to mark it as updated.

3. LLB has SelfServicing scenario that is good for small applications as entities have self saving and lazy load functionality.

4. As mentioned above, LLB has great support. It seems the rule is to answer during 8h in workdays and 24h in weekends.

LLBLGen is so mature that it generates about six times as much code as necessary. Keep in mind that its first of many confusing and overcomplicated APIs had been designed long before the introduction of generics and LINQ and it shows. Starting a new project using LLBLGen is only understandable if you have already invested years in learning it. In all other cases do yourself a favor and forget it ever existed!