Some Caveats

NHibernate is a provocative toolset for doing object-to-relational mapping (ORM). In general, it performs adequately and can do a variety of OR related tasks. But it isn't perfect.

In particular, the NHibernate documentation is lacking. You may thrash around the Web to find the right example that can help you built real-world solutions. With its legacy of sprouting from the Java Hibernate project, there are plenty of examples online (and a book from O'Reilly), but specific examples in .NET are harder to find.

The other caveat for potential users is to be aware that like most ORM products, NHibernate is a tradeoff between less code and less performance. If I were to do a large scale or high-volume project, it would probably choose to not use an ORM solution. On the other hand, if time-to-market were most important for my project, ORM is a great solution for increasing developer productivity.

With this article, I intended to whet your appetite for using NHibernate in your own projects. Hopefully, by providing some straightforward examples that show you how to read in your own objects, this article has helped you evaluate NHibernate as a tool to keep in your toolbox.

Because of the limitations of space and time, I could not provide examples that saved data back to the database, but if you look on the NHibernate site and other places on the web, I think you'll find the breadth of example you need. You'll also find several examples in the file that accompanies this article here.

For more information:

• NHibernate on the Web at Hibernate.org
• Paul Wilson's NHibernate Real World example