Learning nhibernate...

[stoymigo]

I once played around with llblgen pro, I liked the table columns intellisense, helps when you can't remember the column names of tables with many columns.
Is nhibernate also powerful and useful, does it help to speed up development?

[scudsucker]

Oh. God. No.


If you must, use Fluent nHibernate. But I would avoid it in general. Plain nHibernate has a really irritating system of using XML to describe relationships etc. which shows errors only at runtime. I found it a real pain to use, and every database schema change broke loads of things... so unless you have an established and unchanging DB schema, don't use it.

Documentation is not great because things change between versions and very few documents state which version they refer to...

Do not even begin to think about using stored procedures (instead of the queries nHibernate creates) unless you have huge patience and several weeks worth of time and beer.

Also - nHibernate does not generate the boring bits for you (unlike llbgen) - you have to manually create loads of files.

If you want to learn something, look at Dapper, and extend it - http://code.google.com/p/dapper-dot-net/ or if you prefer generated code, Codesmith + NetTiers is decent.