Interfacing OR Mapping with ADO.NET

Coming from the Java world, OR mapping has been a strong, no strident topic of conversation for years. Yesterday saw a significant milestone with JSR-244, Java EE Specification 5.0 and JSR-220, EJB 3.0 graduating to fully matured specifications, ready for commercial implementations. Expect to see plenty of announcements at this years JavaOne, which I will miss this year but will be watching closely from afar. The journey of standard persistence and o/r mapping has been fraught to say the least with some very public disagreements as to the preferred direction of each standard, and in particular whether, JDO or EJB should be anointed as the preferred mechanism of EJB 3.0. The ServerSide.NET, the sister publication of the vastly more active ServerSide.COM publishes some useful high level discussion on the various options available to ADO.NET and .NET developers in general. While I am not intimately familiar with ObjectSpaces, Microsoft's attempt at providing a real world ORM mechanism, we can probably look to how Linda deMichiel approached the thorny issue. As specification lead for EJB 3.0 she went out of her way to engage with the Hibernate, JDO and even the Spring Framework communities to come-up with something everyone could agree on. Why I continue to monitor various entities announcing their take on O/R Mapping, many of these credible entries in the market place are unlikely to see wide adoption until their is an underlying standard backed by the leader in the technology, that is of course Microsoft. So my appeal to the community is lets hear your ideas, learn from the experiences of EJB 3.0 and work co-operatively for the solution that will be the spring board for the level of innovations and activity that could perhaps one day equal the Hibernate community.