My guess is that ICriteria.SetMaxResults( int maxResults ) and ICriteria.SetFirstResult( int firstResult ) is probably designed for the purpose of paging the result. However, I personaly think that only with a ICrtiera.Count() method, can ICriteria provide full paging support.

This Count method should return the count of the result records without query any more information from the database.
What do you think?

This was added to NHibernate 1.2 Beta1 in the form of projections for criterias. That way you can do count, avg, max, and whatever other aggregations you want.

Thanks very much!