>What would be ideal would be if I could get the enum to automatically get built from the table, which is what Mike seems to do with nHibernate.
Not exactly... my Enumeration is the source for the table. My table is not the source for my Enumeration - just a dumb place to store the type. If you need to store friendly display names them you may want to have your DB structure mirror your enumeration and do the mapping in your code.