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
