If you develop database applications in .Net, you will almost certainly be confronted with the questions “How do I access my data?” and “Which DAL/ORM framework should I use?” etc.
The learning curve usually starts with plain-old SqlCommand and DataReader, goes on with “hacking your own” and ends with an undecidable option of existing frameworks.
Recently I came across Dapper.Net, which essentially is an extension class for the IDbConnection interface, and maps the result of a literal SQL command onto an object model. This is similar to my experiments (2 years ago already) that I developed here, but better optimized for performance as it is used at Stack Overflow.
See the author’s blog for discussion of the ORM and optimization of existing queries. The Dapper homepage also has some numbers comparing performance with other ORM’s.
devioblog 