I've recently started using their micro-ORM Dapper, and I like it a lot. I get the performance of hand-coded SQL, but without the tedious mapping from SqlDataReader to my entity.
Dapper is nice, but if you want to have the compiler check your queries, and still run fast, I recommend LINQ to DB: https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db
(not to be confused with LINQ to SQL from Microsoft)