Work has come along on a feature-enhanced stand-in for the ObjectDataSource which provides the ease of use many developers have come to expect from Visual Data Source controls in Visual Studio.

 It appears this project is either in hibernation or has been discontinued so I am writing this to either hear otherwise, or offer the work I have done in this area.

It is a literal drop-in control, leveraging WinForms integration for web-control usability. However, this control is fully integrated with ActiveRecord (regardless of base type) and is fairly far along in testing with NHibernate (not v2.0 FYI).

As ActiveWriter is such a stand-out in terms of 'wow' factor, many development organizations making the transition to ORM in my experience have found it compelling to combine these two technologoes.

 For  example. a developer could drag a few tables from server explorer, create the desired semantic decorations which are then pushed through to code, and then leverage say the compelling server-side paging model with this ActiveRecordDataSource for CRUD operations in an optimized fashion.

Also, food for thought, as ActiveRecord is so closely bound (quite literally actually) to NHibernate, might it be a goal when possible to support both in the same artifact?

If you have interest in this let me know as I am using this now on consulting projects and continually adding features (including VS 2008). I would love to eventually make it possible to integrate this with ActiveWriter in the same compelling way the NHQG is. 

Thanks,

Damon Wilder Carr