OK, don't shoot the messenger. I don't want to get into a debate about Java vs .NET

I'm curious if anyone has ported Hibernate to the .NET environment. We're a development shop that works in both spaces, and a job has come along that the client requires to be written in .NET. We'd prefer to use Java, one reason being that we can use Hibernate.

So, has anyone has any success porting Hibernate to the .NET platform using Microsoft

The only one I know is http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate.
Try to contact them, they tag thier work as pre-alpha.

Andy, the sourceforge project is dead. I have tried many times to contact the lead developers to see if I could contribute and got no response.

However, in my spare time I have been working on it and I have enough features implemented to use it on an internal project. It is nowhere near feature complete. Some of the features I have not tested or used are:

- HQL - I haven't even looked at the existing code yet. However, the ICriterial interface is fully supported except SqlExpression portion
- cascades throw exceptions and I haven't looked at why
- haven't implemented blobs or clobs
- Mapping - not every mapping that references a class is external assembly aware.
- NHibernate needs field accessors. In .NET property get/set have the same visibility so you can't have a private Id property setter if you have a public Id property getter.
- Proxies: I am not quite sure how to do this with .NET and the implications with Serializing a Proxied object.
- Sets: I just implemented a shim infront of IDictionary because .NET has no Set interface.
- Inverse Collections: I haven't tested because I just wrote the Set stuff.
- How to identify NULL values that are mapped to structs. In .NET there is no such thing as a null Int32 - they default to 0.

It sill has some places where the it is not in synch with Hibernate 2.0.3 because the developers all copied from a different version.

I would like to get admin/developer status on the SourceForge project but have no idea how to do it if the existing admin is AWOL. If that is not possible we could start up a new one. If I understand the licensing stuff - IANAL, but I do work for them :), but the are not lawyers in the IT field - we could create a new project if we rename the output DLL and give the original guys some credit.

The forums on NHibernate have some of the discussion if you want some background on the issues.

Let me know if you have any interest and we can chat outside this forum, unless other Hibernate users are interested...

Mike