Switching from ASP.NET to ASP MVC without using LINQ and EF

Question

This is unfortunately more broad of a question than I'd really like to ask, but I'm not finding much that addresses this well online. The issue I have is that the version of Informix we're using is 10.5. LINQ and EF compatibility was not added until Informix 11.10. Due to legacy software, we're unable to upgrade our version of Informix at this time.

With that in mind, is MVC still a usable approach? The documentation, questions, and books I've looked through all very heavily integrate EF and LINQ with MVC. If MVC is usable and advisable without those two components, what would be the recommended approach to take in their absence for handling the data approach to the application?

Answer 1

is MVC still a usable approach?

Sure - MVC is completely agnostic of the data source. Linq^* is still an option too, you'd just need to build your repository to return IEnumerable<T> using some other method (like ADO.NET with custom mapping or some other ORM). you could then use Linq in your controllers to query the data coming out of the repositories.

^{* By Linq I mean Linq-to-Objects, not Linq-to-Entities}