Better Entities with Nullable Types
There is an impedance mismatch between objects and normalized relational databases. Everyone knows this. Almost everyone has tried to fix it—think object-oriented databases—and some people have gotten famous off of proposed solutions. (Deservedly so or not.) Well, truth be told Microsoft is working on an ADO.NET Entity Framework to address this issue. The issue phrased using my words is getting data from databases into objects makes for better programming but is time consuming, tedious, and not altogether convenient. From what I know of LINQ, LINQ for Data, and the Entity Framework, they may really be on to something.
In the meantime, you have applications to write. To that end, this article is designed to give you some ideas about how to take a lot of the work out of creating an entity framework (or data access layer, if you prefer) by using some of the newer features in .NET such as generics and nullable types and some staples, like Reflection.