.NET – Relationship Between Task Parallel Library and Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern

In my firm we are using the EF. It's a nice ORM, suitable for our small project. In reality people are using EF or NHibernate. Both frameworks are good. EF has a great MS support and you can find great tools bundled with Visual Studio. NHibernate is considered better than EF but there is a bigger "learning curve" so you will spend more time adopting it.

I think that, if you are on the Ado.Net "classic" try the EF. Create a simple project and replace some of the DAL methods. Check how it works and how you can manage/modify the code. Compare it with the simple "SqlDataReader" methods and decide which is better. Remember that every technology shift needs some time for adoption so you have to calculate if this change will be beneficial for your company in the long run.

TBB is pretty much all there is that comes close. boost::thread is much too low level. You're looking in the wrong place at the TPL, by the way- Microsoft ship a separate library called the PPL for native code. It, of course, only supports Windows.

However, if you find TBB to be complicated to use, I'd question whether or not the developers you're thinking about are actually capable of creating parallel applications. TBB has one of the friendliest interfaces around with simple things like parallel_for_each. If you can't cope with a couple of lambdas, I find it hard to see how you'll cope with concurrency.