So my question is simply, any input, on pro and cons for the two
Hello,
I don't know much about vanatec and therefore I can't tell you if it's good or not but here are the main reasons why I chose LLblgen:
1) Unlike many ORMs, it's easy to get started with if you follow the tutorial. When I started, although I was a .net newbie (coming from the java world), it only took me one day to learn about most aspects of llblgen. It's very straightforward... you can create a new project from an existing DB and be ready to use your DAL in visual studio within minutes, no mapping files to edit (nhibernate), no command line based tasks...
2) The query engine is extremely powerful! You can create 100% compile time checked queries of any complexity (including subqueries, multiple joins, aggregates) in an easily readable manner and with full intellisense support.
3) The generated entities and collections can be easily extended to become nice business objects if you want to use them this way. They implement a lot of interfaces which allows you to directly bind them to your UI controls, sort them, filter them, perform validation tasks....
4) Distributed scenarios are very well supported. Very important if you're planning to use webservices and/or .Net remoting.
5) The product is relatively inexpensive and well known for the quality of its customer support. Your questions are answered by qualified professionals (and even by the lead developper of llblgen himself) in no time on the forum and it's common to see other llblgen users kindly trying to help by sharing their own experience about your problem.
My target DBs are MS SQL 2005 and Firebird (server and embedded).
You might be interessed to know that they are both very well supported. My current app runs on firebird and lets the end user choose between server or embedded mode.
As you may know if you have been evaluating many ORM tools, firebird is sometimes not as well supported as other RDBMS like Sql server which are more popular in the .Net world, even if advertising doesn't state it clearly.