ASP.NET MVC open source application. MySQL or SQL Server? [closed]

Question

I have around 4 years experience of ASP.NET & SQL Server (only web forms). I have a little knowledge of Ruby on Rails and have developed one very small 2-3 pages application in ASP.NET MVC in my job. Now I and one of my friend ( same experience like me) are willing to gain more experience of ASP.NET MVC. For that purpose we have thought of developing an open source application in ASP.NET MVC. It can be a a blog system or forum or anything else so that community can also take benefit of it. But we are not able to decide the back-end database for the application between MySQL and SQL Server. What will you suggest in terms of following -

1. Which will be more supported or required by community?
2. If we use MySQL, will it be a tough road ahead?
3. Is there any chance of supporting both by using ORM (I have no experience of working with any ORM)
4. Any other suggestion ?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you can't decide which to use as a backend, then one suggestion I have it define an interface for the data layer, use the IRepository pattern against this interface, and simply pick one and write an implementation of the data layer for that choice. In a (successful) open source project, it's unlikely that everyone who wants to use it will have the same ideas about what database will work for them. In that case, designing it so that it can use any database, given a suitable implementation of the interface is a wise move. Using something like nHibernate, which already supports many different databases may be the route you want to go if you don't mind having dependencies on other libraries.