Hello all,

I'd like to know if I'm making the right decision. I'm developing an application that allows the user to mix database entries in a local database (possibly SQL CE or SQLite) and in a remote database (most probably MySQL). Ideally it would have to be flexible and compatible with several database server types (statically as per initial config, not mixing several types dynamically) but this is not a show-stopper.

The code is C#, .NET 4.

Naturally, I was thinking about NHibernate since it features LINQ in version 3.0, a plus for code readability and efficiency, and the model-first approach is more natural than Entity Framework. It also has Shards for the mixed database part, which should be much easier to handle. The other option is EF 4, which I would otherwise favour since it's fully supported in the .NET context and by Visual Studio, and has a promising future there.

Is Shards mature enough? It has been stuck to 3 beta for quite a while now and looks like a dead project, have people deployed professional applications based on this extension? Does it have a future? Or is there another option?

Does NHibernate 3 run on Mono? I think so, but a confirmation would be great.

Thanks in advance for any information or feedback!