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.
NHibernate has reached version 3.0 Alpha 1, and is “rock solid”, according to Jason Dentler, author of the upcoming book "NHibernate 3 Cookbook" from Packt Publishing, and interviewed by Scott Hanselman. Dentler also said that even if it is an alpha release, NHibernate 3 is already used in production.
The NHibernate team has gradually released new features into the code trunk, and now they are part of the alpha release. So, while these features are not necessarily new for NHibernate users, they are worth mentioning. NHibernate 3.0 supports .NET Framework 3.5, so developers can use LINQ and lambdas and still persist their objects. Dentler also said that NHibernate has a LINQ provider that is working well being backed by 300 unit tests.
Beside bug fixes, NHibernate 3.0 contains a number of new features like:
- [NH-429] - Lazy load columns
- [NH-1922] - Allow DetachedCriteria To Work with IStatelessSession
- [NH-1978] - Add ability to delimit aliases in generated SQL
- [NH-2152] - QueryOver equality to null should generate (x is null or x == value)
The code is currently frozen for new features until the actual release which is expected for the end of the year, probably in November.
The NHibernate Profiler, a separate commercial project maintained by Hibernating Rhinos, is a debugging tool for analyzing the usage of NHibernate in projects, especially the SQL generated. The tool is expected to be updated to support NHibernate 3.
HQL Language Service for Visual Studio is a new Visual Studio Addin by José F. Romaniello, offering Hibernate Query Language (HQL) syntax highlighting and checking, and partial Intellisense support.