15 December 2005 in .Net, Tools | Comments enabled

I was reading about nHibernate generation over on David’s blog and added a comment which I thought could be posted here as well.

In the last few months a friend and I have been playing around with nHibernate a bit in various ways. I personally found that initially there was a bit of a high learning curve, mostly because I wasn’t aware of how like nHibernate Hibernate was. This meant that I initially disregarded all the Hibernate related content (first mistake ). There isn’t much out there in the way of documentation for nHibernate unfortunately.

So initially we wrote a basic generator to take care of the generation for us. This all went well except when it came to generating the collections (one-to-many, many-to-many etc). That was until I found this site: http://www.xylax.net/hibernate/. After finding that my only problem was not correctly referencing the assembly and fully qualifying the classes used in the collections.

I’m about halfway through reading Hibernate In Action. So far it’s been quite good, it’s pretty easy to disregard any content that is too Java specific. I would strongly recommend it to anybody who is serious about getting their nHibernate/Hibernate data-layer working well. The book focuses on version 2.2 of Hibernate which is great as nHibernate is only functionally equal to this version (mostly ).

Now I’m just looking forward to the next version of nHibernate which will hopefully include some .Net 2.0 features (Generic collections, nullable types). There are currently third party add-ins to enable this functionality but I’m not a huge fan of relying on third party components – it just makes upgrades more difficult.

- JD

P.S. The logo isn’t the official nHibernate logo, but one potential one.