Which is the “best” data access framework/approach for C# and .NET?

Question

(EDIT: I made it a community wiki as it is more suited to a collaborative format.)

There are a plethora of ways to access SQL Server and other databases from .NET. All h

Answer 1

I must say that I never used NHibernate for the immense time that needed to start using... time wasted on the XML setup.

I recently did a web application in MVC2, where I did choose ADO Entities Framework and I use Linq all the time.

I must say, I was impressed with the speed! and our site was having around 35 000 unique visitors per day, in around 60Gb bandwidth per day (I reduced radically this 60Gb number by hosting all static files in Amazon S3 - Great .NET wrapper they have, I must say).

I will always go this way. It's easy to start (just add new data item, choose tables and that's it! for every change in the database we just need to refresh the model - made automatically in just 2 clicks) and it's fun to use - Linq rules!