I have been using NHIbernate for a few weeks now on a project about to go into production. I am so impressed that I'd like to help out with development.

Since I'm still getting familiar with it, I am currently going through the code to get more of an understanding. I see a lot of little things I could do to improve the code, such as consistency in naming conventions, spacing and formatting and stuff like that. I would use the built-in tools in VS.NET 2005, FxCop, and Resharper as guidance for these changes.

What would be the best way to facilitate this process so that I can provide my code changes to the core team? The nature of the what I want to do would mean a lot of tiny changes to a lot of files. I currently have the 0.8.4 code checked into a Subversion repository on my machine, so it should be easy to make patch files from this. Should I check out the latest revision from the CVS repository and start with that? I'm looking for some guidance/blessing from the dev team on how to proceed.

The end result would be a clean and consistant codebase and a good understanding of the code by myself so that I could then contribute to more functional enhancements. Personally, I'd very much like to see NHibernate get ready for .NET 2.0. Generics and anonymous methods and iterators! Yah!


PS: Running the VS 2005 builtin FXCop on the solution generates over 1200 warnings. Yikes!

Great :!: A volunteer :)

Did you read NHibernate Needs You! ? ;)

If you really want to start helping, check out the CVS version and look around...
Formatting the code is certainly a TODO in NHibernate, but ATM, I worry more about fixing bugs and adding new features; so when you start feeling confortable with NHibernate source code, try to fix some bugs and post the patch on Jira bug tracker. It will also give you a deeper understanding of how NHibernate works.

We will think more about Formatting when we get near the 1.0 release :)

My coding has improved from the recommendations that FxCop gives, but that's all the credit I can give it. If all .net projects followed all those rules, some of the best "magic" code wouldn't exist. Compiler warnings and ReSharper warnings are much more meaningful to me. YMMV

I'm having trouble connecting to the CVS server. Probably our firewall blocking ports. Is there a way to download the latest code via HTTP?

There should be some way to workaround firewall...

Anyway, you can download the Nightly CVS Tarballs and check it out locally :)