For all you business application developers out there, I've recently discovered the concept of Object Persistence Frameworks (OPF's) and
Object-Relational Mapping (O/RM). Basically, OPF's arose out of the fact that every business application is doing the same basic tasks: querying data from a database, persisting it temporarily in memory, displaying it to the user for viewing or editing, and persisting any user changes back to the database. What if all these tasks could be encapsulated into a framework/object-model that would do these task for the programmer? This persistence framework could do all the wiring-up and SQL building, and even handle null value replacement and record concurrency control.
I've recently been using Gentle.NET, an open source OPF, on two different projects. NHibernate is another open source one that's a .NET port of the JAVA OPF called Hibernate. I spent a couple of weeks at work setting things up so using Gentle.NET would be easy and scalable. In only took about one week of programming to make up that time. In other words, I'd estimate that I was able to do about 3 weeks of programming in that 1 week! Not bad.
Use it. Just don't tell your boss how much extra time you'll have now. ;)
Find out more about
Gentle.NET.