ORM or SQL queries?

MVC, for sure. It's amazing. So much better than web forms. As for the rest, I would use Entity Framework, just because it's pretty standard, and it works well. I guess the alternative question is, do you have a ton of stored procs written ? If so, writing a data layer for those procs might be quicker, esp if you are learning MVC, it might be good for the data layer to basically write itself.