I saw a post today about ORMs and how they are hard to use and maintain. Since we saw ActiveRecord/NHibernate at Ben 's talk and we're going to have more talks on ORM tools there may be questions. I wanted to share my experience and assuage some fears about ORMs that may be holding you up from getting started.. I'm using NHibernate , which does have a learning curve , but it's not as steep as you might think. Here are one of the criticisms mentioned: They are not legacy system friendly...