A few weeks ago I made a major course correction in our choice of ORM data layer. We had planned to use LLBLGen Pro but several issues with the code that it generates continued to bother me. First, it's support for stored procedures lacked the ability to strongly type the resultset. Second, the data entity classes do not easily support serialization over WCF with the option to dress them up with the appropriate attributes.

So I took a second look at PLINQO with CodeSmith 5.0, something I had considered some time ago but had decided against because I felt it was not sufficiently mature for our team's use. I wanted to see if the dev team had improved the product to the point that I believed it would work for us. I'm very happy I gave it another try. They have done a great job and restored my confidence in LINQ to SQL.

With PLINQO, I found that I could return to standard LINQ to SQL queries and enjoy many of the benefits I had looked forward to using in LLBLGen Pro such as "disconnected" entities. And much to my satisfaction, PLINQO resolves the two major issues I had with the LLBLGen Pro. The improvements over standard LINQ to SQL may seem small at first but when dealing with a very large, enterprise class database, the enhancements that PLINQO offers are critical, including the separation of entities into individual class files.

There are many more features and benefits with PLINQO than I have time to review here. If you're looking for a better LINQ to SQL than LINQ to SQL, look very carefully at PLINQO. I mean, who couldn't fall in love with code like this all buttoned up for you automatically:

private long _userId;

//// <summary>
/// Gets the USER_ID column value.
/// </summary>
[System.Data.Linq.Mapping.Column(Name = "USER_ID", Storage = "_userId", 
     DbType = "bigint NOT NULL IDENTITY", IsPrimaryKey = true, 
	 IsDbGenerated = true, CanBeNull = false)]
[System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMember(Order = 1)]
public long UserId
{
    get { return _userId; }
    set
    {
        if (_userId != value)
        {
            OnUserIdChanging(value);
            SendPropertyChanging("UserId");
            _userId = value;
            SendPropertyChanged("UserId");
            OnUserIdChanged();
        }
    }
}