ASP.NET 3.0 will need to be based on ORM

Having played with the modern agile web frameworks lately, namely Ruby on Rails and Django, and as such having been out of the progressive .NET loop, I'm going to make a blind projection that the next version of ASP.NET - assumedly 3.0 as part of the WinFX framework - will be heavily based on an intelligent object/relational mapper. While the objectives of furthering the Framework will be reducing code, increasing performance, a high level of abstraction, and declarative over syntactical programming, a major part of competitive leveraging will have to be making the platform "stupidly fast" (borrowing a line from Django's Adrian Holovaty) through a wickedly smart ORM interface.

This will ostensibly be akin to more pure MVC but undoubtedly behave in more Microsoft-centric fashion, managing communications between n-number of application tiers. The need to write complex SQL will be eliminated, but still supported, I envision. Combining the best of ASP.NET 2.0 with the agile technologies, control-based configuration will allow communications with complex data structures, and automate a lot of repetitive actions, like CRUD operations.

.NET 1.x tried to do this in ADO.NET's managed classes, and did it OK. The type management and marshalling of DataSet data is great. But the one problem I've got has been the SqlCommandBuilder class in the System.Data.SqlClient namespace. Rarely, if ever, do apps that I build require a single database table. I swear, I've tried countless times to make SqlCommandBuilder to work for me, and I always wind up writing the SQL by hand and hacking out some solution.

If Microsoft maintains it's history of product development, it's going to be smart and recognize the major benefit of newer frameworks, and build this into its next version.