Hi Keith,
We do offer more than you would get by using the default features Visual Studio provides.
1) You are provided with 1-year support, responding in less than 24 hours (Priority support) or 48 hours (Standard support). Apart from it, you have a huge community of developers and substantial quantity of Forum posts, Knowledge Base articles and a thorough Developer Guide at your disposal that will make you problem resolution fast. We are providing a free SDK Browser application including dozens of sample solutions, providing end-to-end best practices for your reference.
2) We are offering features like:
- SQL Profiler and Tuning Advisor, which will open the black box of auto-generated queries allowing you to optimize the performance of your application and even pinpointing several types of query issues
- Data Services Wizard - generating various kinds of WCF services including RIA, Data Services and the plain Web Services. It will be very handy if you want to expose your data through a service and will save you a lot of time.
- With the upcoming release (within days) we are enhancing our Stored Procedures support with the new Stored Procedure Editor, including functionality for handling multiple result sets
Apart from those points, you will also find plenty of other small improvements and optimizations.
I hope that information proves to be helpful to your choice of ORM solution and I would be glad to assist you further or explain in detail some feature that you are particularly interested in or point you to the relevant resources.
We are looking forward to your feedback.
Kind regards,
Ivailo
the Telerik team