I really like to use ActiveRecord when building small apps or internal tools. It offers a lot of great features of his older brother NHibernate, without freightening everybody on your team.
I also really like the ability to generate the database schema based on the domain entities, so you don’t have to worry about SQL and DDL.
Combine that with SQLite, and you can develop on your local machine without an installed database server (like Sql Server). Makes it really easy to setup a new development machine (checkout the code, build and run – it should works).
