Object Relational Mapping tools have gotten a lot of “press” over the course of the last several years. As more and more developers start to realize their potential, they’ll also get to experience the object/relational impedance mismatch first hand! With the upcoming release of ADO.NET Entities the Microsoft developer community will finally learn to grok the power of the conceptual model. They’ll learn to love how it lets them think about their domain and they’ll really love the fact that they won’t have to write boat loads of SQL to get the data out of their relational model and into their conceptual domain model.
While it’s receiving a lot less press, XLinq (Linq to Xml) will also bring some very welcome changes for the .NET developers of the world. XLinq is going to make working with Xml much more natural and much more in line with how we deal with all kinds of data within our applications (Thank you Mr. Linq). While XLinq will make working with data much more bearable it too will bring to light the impedance mismatch that exists between objects and xml. Lucky for us it sounds like the brain trust at Microsoft is trying to squash the mismatch out of existence, albeit with quite a few challenges remaining. In their latest paper Eric Meijer and Ralf Lammel talk in depth about the X/O impedance mismatch (via Sam Gentile). Although they acknowledge that the X/O impedance mismatch cannot be fully eliminated I’m confident they’ll come as close as possible to making the mismatch disappear.