I am a Java developer who has used Hibernate quite abit, and found it very useful for writing clean modulated code. I have recently changed jobs and now must use the ASP.net platform....and am considering using NHibernare, one because i really like Hibernate and two because it is familar.

I was just wondering if it is wise for me to adopt this technology....as being a Java Dev i dont have a finger on the pluse of the ASP.NET/microsoft world. Is nHibernate something that is going to be around for awhile? and will be adopted by a large community of developers? Are there any other more mature products that offer simular functionality?

Also there is a tool for hibernate that generates the entity class and database schema for you from the mapping file is there anything like this for nhibernate?

As you said, NHibernate is very similar to Hibernate; and it is here to stay (read NHibernate joins Hibernate at JBoss Inc.)

For the tools, NHibernate has hbm2net, SchemaExport (hbm to ddl) and NHibernate.Mapping.Attributes (net to hbm)...

Unlike the Java world, where hibernate pretty much has a lock on the ORM market (or so I'm told, I'm not much of a Java guru), there are many, many ORM tools in the .net world, some of which are older and more widely used than NHibernate. A couple of links illustrate the problem:

http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=29914
http://sharptoolbox.com/Pages/Category74089b0a-1105-4389-b1db-eedf27e20cfb.aspx

After evaluating several of what we thought were the leading contenders as well as NHibernate, my company decided to use NHibernate, partly because, like you, we have experience with hibernate that translates nicely, and partly because NHibernate just seemed like a better product than almost all of the other ORM tools we tried, commercial or no. After a few months using it, I'm still convinced we made the right decision.

Cheers for the help guys