Why isn't BLToolkit more popular? [closed]

Question

While searching around the net for light, fast ORMs targeting .NET, I came across BLToolKit, which seems absolutely amazing in terms of performance, openness, maintainability, and flexibility.

However, I've also noticed that it has received very little love by the community and only has 9 questions on SO. Can anyone shed more light on this?

Are folks just rolling their own DALs, in love with Entity Framework, or using some other ORM?

Bibliomancy

Should be closed as off-topic. – Lolita

@tylermwashburn: not off-topic, but absolutely subjective. – Climax

Personally, I rate developer's comfort with BLToolkit sufficient to prefer it to nHibernate or EF, and I've worked with all 3 ORMS in real life projects for at least a year each. It does have high performance, e.g. as shown on ormbattle.net. But since there are very low investments in BLToolkit community, marketing, or popularization in general, it has extremely low visibility and hence low community trust. – Schlemiel

Check this, I think this answer part of your question bltoolkit.net/Doc.LinqModel.ashx – Vocation

Good question, not too subjective, and the answer would be valuable to many – Carnage

Somehow this appears as marketing for me. Just being skeptical. Apologies if I'm wrong. – Halfblood

Oh just to answer you, the big companies as well as day to day average programmers (both of who encompass the vast majority of programmers) always tend to align with the official and de facto solution. Since MS has invested in ORM not many would think anything more than EF. It is the middle players who are willing to try and experiment (who forms the SO demography for eg) would think of alternatives. And there are many choices there. – Halfblood

To tell you my case, I go with EF. Because it is from MS. Not necessarily I believe MS delivers the best but because I dont have the time to invest to try alternatives which are plenty in number. So the most logical for people like me is to go for MS's choice. Also Dapper being from the stackexchange group and SO slowly becoming the bible of programming is not helping either. I think Dapper is improving its numbers steadily. – Halfblood

Answer 1

After a quick peek at BLToolkit (compared to my ORM of choice, subsonic) it seems that bltoolkit is a everything AND the kitchen sink kind of solution, personally I prefer the opinionated aspects of subsonic, choice is cool, but when it comes to getting and setting data for me (personally anyways) simplicity trumps extensibility.

Pya

you don't have to use the full set of features of the library for the particular app (when the size of the final application doesn't matter, but in the .NET world - who thinks about the size of the DLL). I used BLToolkit as an amazing mapper for the database structures, and I tried to avoid its query-generation features. – Granada