I have been working on a C# 2.0 project I call MyNHibernateContrib that adds support for many of the .NET 2.0 features that NHibernate does not yet officially support. It's still a work in progress, but I use it on all my projects and find it very useful. It adds support for these features:

Nullable types (C# 2.0 style)
Generic collections
Parent-child collections that manage setting the child's parent reference automatically.
A session manager base class that provides: 2.0 Generic methods for getting individual or lists of entities, methods to clear and initialize database, including adding some initial data at each reconstruction of the database, and methods to help get sessions properly handled for ASP.NET web sites.

It's a growing project--one that I hope to get adopted by NHibernate into its NHibernateContrib project, or started as NHibernateContrib20 for .NET 2.0 additions.

Anyway, I'm releasing it as LGPL. I encourage patches and updates while I get it ready to submit for an official NHibernateContrib-type project. I still need a test project to verify proper operation (for NHibernate to accept it, and good form anyway), and I need to write some example use cases for it, as the generic collections still need a little bit of plumbing code to be added for users of it in order to get it to work with NHibernate.

Check out the source code here:
http://fhsssvn.byu.edu/Libraries/MyNHibernateContrib/trunk/

Comments welcome!

Hi,

As I still haven't start using .NET 2.0, I can't give you meanful feedbacks...

Anyway, it is a good contribution which deserve to be in NHibernateContrib.

As you said some unit tests and example applications would be useful.
Can you also write a "readme.txt" ? (or a full documentation if you can ;) )

I will just as soon as I can (a few days and I'll be done, I think).

One more feature that this library provides that I forgot to mention: It simplifies the scenario where you have a one-to-many parent-child relationship, where parents point to children and children have references to their parent. Without this library, two steps are required to add a child:

Now with this library, all you have is:

And the library sets the Parent attribute for you. And removing the child from the parent's collection also sents Child.Parent to null.

As with the generic collection wrapper classes in the library, a little bit of plumbing is required, but much less than would otherwise be necessary to implement this. And as with all the other functionality, some documentation is necessary, which I'll put up on that repository ASAP.

Ok, I've added a bunch of VS2005-style unit tests to the project. Not quite all of which are implemented, but they should be easy enough to read to get an idea of how to code using the library. I also trimmed the last directory from the URL in my first post, so that the unit tests and license files are visible.

I was wondering if you ever created any docs for this? As i am bit confused on how to use it with my project. Especially the nullable types.

I took a look at the code, and I don't see how this is working in complex scenarios where you've more than one collection per class.

I'm working on a patch for NHib that would enable generic sets & two ways connections. I hope to be done with it this weekend.

I have enhanced MyNHibernateContrib tons over the last several months, and I have added an example web app and library that demonstrates using two-way collections, generics and nullables. Same URL as before. Hope others find this useful.

So, how's that .NET 2.0 version of the NHibernateContrib library looking? I'd like to add my library to it once it's available.

cool, go for it.

how does this compare against ayende's project? What made you want to write this yourself?

I started this project several months ago, and at the time there was not another project going that did this -- at least not as far as the NHibernate forum seemed to know about.

I don't know anything about ayende's project. A quick google search picked out http://www.ayende.com/projects/nhibernate-query-analyzer/generics.aspx
which may be what you're referring to. If so, mine may be inferior, at least in style if not in capability. I'll have to learn more about it.

.NET 2.0 features are being added to CVS HEAD now, so I'm also curious how this compares and what features are/will be different.

Erm... Am I the only one who doesn't know which .NET 2.0 features are being added ? I'm guessing it's strongly-typed collections but as I have seen from Ayende's efforts, there are many ways to skin a cat. I'm curious as to how the NHibernate team is skinning it. :-)

Or have I missed a thread somewhere discussing this ?

Sven