NHibernate is an innovative, flexible, scalable, and feature-complete open source project for data access. Although it sounds like an easy task to build and maintain database applications, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and develop applications that meet your needs perfectly.

The NHibernate Cookbook explains each feature of NHibernate 3.0 in detail through example recipes that you can quickly apply to your applications. Set yourself free from stored procedures and inline SQL. Quite simply, if you build .NET applications that use databases, this book is for you.

The book will take you from the absolute basics of NHibernate through its most advanced features and beyond, showing you how to take full advantage of each concept to quickly create amazing database applications. Beginners will learn several techniques for each of the 4 core NHibernate tasks - mapping, configuration, session & transaction management, and querying - and which techniques fit best with various types of applications. In short, you will be able to build an application using NHibernate. Intermediate level readers will learn how to best implement enterprise application architecture patterns using NHibernate, leading to clean, easy-to-understand code, and increased productivity. In addition to new v3.0 features, advanced readers will learn creative ways to extend NHibernate core, as well as techniques using the NHibernate search, shards, spatial, and validation projects.

Get solutions to common NHibernate problems to develop high-quality performance-critical data access applications

What you will learn from this book

• Create a persistent object model for moving data in and out of your database
• Build the database from your model automatically
• Configure NHibernate for use with WebForms, MVC, WPF, and WinForms applications
• Create database queries using a variety of methods, including the new LINQ to NHibernate and QueryOver APIs
• Build an enterprise-level data access layer
• Improve the performance of your applications using a variety of techniques
• Build an infrastructure for fast, easy test-driven development of your data access layer
• Extend NHibernate to add data encryption and auditing
• Implement entity validation, full-text search, horizontal partitioning (sharding), and spatial queries using NHibernate Contrib projects

Approach

This book contains quick-paced self-explanatory recipes organized in progressive skill levels and functional areas. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book is designed so that you can read it from start to end or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes. In short this book is meant to be the ultimate "how-to" reference for NHibernate 3.0, covering every major feature of NHibernate for all experience levels.

Who this book is written for