Endgame Viable

I’ve been starting to work a little bit with LINQ to SQL and now the ADO.NET Entity Framework* (to implement ORM** for UvMoney, my home banking system).  There’s something that troubles me about both frameworks.  Both require you to build a “model” of your database with a designer, from which strongly-typed classes are generated, which you can then use in your LINQ queries.

This is quite similar to the designer-built strongly-typed DataSets from .NET 1.1 and 2.0, which I never enjoy using very much because there always seems to be something just a little bit wrong with them.  With ADO.NET, my preference has always been to build my own ORM classes.  Which makes me wonder:  How do I take advantage of LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework while still building my own classes?  I suppose I should give up on that line of thought before I start, because implementing my own ORM classes would essentially be duplicating what LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework do.

• According to rumor, Microsoft will be concentrating on the Entity Framework going forward, so there is little point in spending much more effort learning LINQ to SQL classes.

** ORM is Object-Relational Mapping, which is a fancy term for the process of sticking database values into object properties and vice versa.