Hi, Tracy.

>Interested in everyone's tactics for creating entities and mappers to handle complex join conditions and complex relationships. If the goal is to have a foundation built ahead of time, then when new joins are required later by programmers, how to accomplish that without having to modify the separate layers you've built? Any sites out there with ideas on handling that? Any way of creating entities on the fly?
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>What is the general method out there in the dotnet world for handling entities and mappers and complex joins or parent-multiple child scenarios later when the product is in maitenance mode?
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>What if Codesmith is used to generate the mappers and business entities? you dont' want to run codesmith every time a new relationship is needed down the road and have to modify that layer.

Did you check the ADO.NET Entity Framework? It basically allows you to build an entity model based on your db schema and then evolve them independently. Of course you have to maintain the mapping, but the tooling is quite good. It is in its last beta, coming as part of .NET 3.5 SP 1 in a month or so (final 1.0 release).

Regards,