This is an update to let everybody know where we are at. We've had some issues with Subsonic which are starting to make it a bad fit for WheelMUD. Also, the facade patter is a bad fit database access in the same scope as the application (at least for us). The facade patter will still be used for the remote administration bits.

Subsonic was created to be, at first, a web data access framework. The creator wanted to have some of the things he saw in Ruby Rails for ASP.NET. Some ingenious developers found ways to adapt it for use in other types of projects. Unfortuantely this is still very cumbersome. Here are some of the things that we find ourselves in need of that Subsonic doesn't have:

• Built-in caching
• Solid support for foreign keys
• Simple column and table mapping strategies
• Large community

One thing that we wanted to stick with is that this technology be free. Foxedup and I were looking at NHibernate and CoolStorage. I personally don't like NHibernate's xml mapping files, because that's a new dependency and extra files that need to be kept under source control. CoolStorage is another small ORM tool for .NET. I realize that NHibernate would align better with our high level goals, so I dropped investigating CoolStorage completely. Fortunately for us, Foxedup found a project called Fluent NHibernate, which does away with xml configuration files. It allows for programmatic configuration.

I did a small test yesterday, and now I'm sold on Fluent NHibernate. I will be creating another post with more information about this.

Don't let this stop anybody from coding. There are a lot of things in releases 0.4 and 0.5 that do not depend on database access. Some of them are still dependent on other systems being there, but if you are not sure, just ask.