This Wrox Blox demonstrates how to start using NHibernate in line business applications using ASP.NET and VB.NET. Using NHibernate will speed up your application development by removing the need to build your own Data Access Layer (DAL). In addition, you can focus solely on the business problem instead of the infrastructure concerns. Using a simple demo application as an example, this Wrox Blox shows how easy it is to get started with NHibernate and build your DAL in minutes instead of hours. Readers will also see how the POCO pattern enables you to keep your DAL as unobtrusive as possible as well as being interchangeable for future DAL implementations. You will also see how NHibernate has many enterprise patterns built into it, like the Unit of Work pattern and the Identity Map.

Table of Contents

What Is an Object Relational Mapper? 2

Why NHibernate? 2

Part 1: Getting Started with NHibernate 2

A Quick Demo 2

Part 2: The NHibernate Framework 13

Architecture and Core Concepts 13

Mapping Your Entities: Impedance Mismatch 16

Persisting Business Objects 18

Part 3: Using NHibernate 19

Introducing the Project and Laying out the Solution Framework 19

Designing the Domain Model 23

NHibernate Repository Project: Base Class 39

Managing Products 48

Managing Customers 58

NHibernate Repository Project: Refactoring and Session Management 69

Managing Orders 74

The Database — A Question of Storage 94

Presentation with the Model–View–Presenter Pattern 96

User Interface: ASP.NET 103

Part 4: Other NHibernate Bits and Pieces 113

Other Querying Methods 113

Mapping Inheritance 115

What Kind of SQL Is Being Produced? 118

Wrap Up 119

Scott Millett 120