Amanda Laucher and Josh Graham present at an introductory level some of the most important elements of the .NET ecosystem: F#, M, Boo, NUnit, RhinoMocks, Moq, NHibernate, Castle, Windsor, NVelocity, Guerilla WCF, Azure, MEF.
In this article Billy McCafferty presents S#arp Architecture, an ASP.NET MVC architectural framework meant to leverage current best practices in architecting ASP.NET web applications by providing a project code template which uses Domain-Driven Design techniques and has built-in support for NHibernate, Castle Windsor and SQLite.
This presentation by Hamilton Verissimo and Oren Eini show Castle Active Record - an ORM solution for .NET building on NHibernate. After an introduction, the presentation dives into various advanced topics and techniques for working with Castle Active Record.
S#arp Lite is an effort to make S#arp Architecture more accessible to all developers; this scaled-back version includes a project template set up to connect to a database via NHibernate, a set of reusable class libraries, a base repository, and a sample project.
NHibernate 3.0 is the first major release of the popular ORM in over a year. With the release it has changed the CLR version to .NET 3.5. This allows the creation of the QueryOver API, while replaces the string-based ICriteria expressions with strongly typed lambda expressions. This is in addition to the built-in LINQ provider.
The latest NHibernate developments include: the release of NHibernate 3.0.0 Alpha 1, NHibernate Profiler supporting NHibernate 3.0, and HQL Language Service for Visual Studio.
LLBLGen Pro is an ORM tool which supports multiple persistence frameworks: LLBLGen Pro Runtime, Entity Framework, NHibernate and LINQ to SQL. Other new features are: support for .NET 4.0, model-first or database-first development mode, model view, project validation.
Recently, a post by Oren Eini (a.k.a. Ayende Raheim) touched off a debate around the respective merits and capabilities of NHibernate and Entity Framework 4.0, two .NET-based Object/Relational Maping frameworks. InfoQ explored this debate in more detail to understand some of the perspectives which were given.
Sadly the terms “ORM” and “performance problems” often travel together. By hiding the underlying SQL from the developers, ORMs can offer a huge productivity boost. Unfortunately they also make it easy to generate ridiculously bad queries without realizing it. And without stored procedures to cross reference, finding the offending code without an ORM-specific profiler can be quite tricky.
