Hello,

Here is a "form" you can fill if you want to give your opinion / suggestions about NHibernate
Note that these information will heavily influence our future works, so don't hesitate to stress what is important for you ;)

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
- Windows Applications
- Web Applications
- Libraries / Services
- All that! ;)
- Others ...
+ Details about the development & production environments.

* How would you qualify these softwares?
- Beginners
- Pet projects
- Professional / Commercial
- Highly scalable, performant, secure, reliable, ... Enterprise Application ;)

* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?
- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple
- The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)
+ the pros & cons (that you have to deal with when using NHibernate)
- The features you want (that aren't available)

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?
- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?
- What kind of samples / demo applications? With which features?

If you have anything else to add ... :)

Here is a "form" you can fill if you want to give your opinion / suggestions about NHibernate
Note that these information will heavily influence our future works, so don't hesitate to stress what is important for you

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?

We started using NHibernate with the version 0.6 and we are very happy with it. So far in has been used in about 4 web projects, but we are moving to the Windows.Forms, probably with the better data binding support in .NET 2.0.

* How would you qualify these softwares?

Professiona/Commercial


* NHibernate experiences?

We have used hibernate before. Another reason is it's simplicity (no inheritance, only 3 object states) and HQL which is very powerfull. Stored ptcedures support and Schema Update, would be nice to be included. Also more unit tests. Maybe even select sum(a.X+a.Y) from Point a.

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)

For documentation we mainly use hibernate. The unit tests are a very good also as documentation.

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
- All that!
We have a rather extended framework for various kinds of software and sectors. We are currently migrating our self written persistance layers to NHibernate.

* How would you qualify these softwares?
- Professional / Commercial
- Highly scalable, performant, secure, reliable, ... Enterprise Application

* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?
--> simplicity, and it simply fits our needs. We don't have to inherit from bases classes or so, that rocks!

- The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)
--> the real pain in the ass for us at the moment is the lack of (good) MS Access support. Many of our clients run on access, what is keeping many projects away from NHibernate. That's very sad because is't a great tool!

* About the documentation?
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?
Rather easy. Every startup is hard, but it went well.
hibernate docs were very helpfull, and of course this forum saved many hours.

If you have anything else to add ...
Not really, just a happy NHibernate user, except the ms access part :)

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
Web Applications, ASP.NET v1.1 using Sql Server 2000. Also tried using MS Access, but quickly gave up.

* How would you qualify these softwares?
Both commercial websites and pet projects

* NHibernate experiences?
- The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)
+ the pros & cons (that you have to deal with when using NHibernate)

* Speed is excellent, I am constantly amazed by how well NH performs.
* Have previously used Wilson OR Mapper - compare to that, I think NH performs faster, but OR Mapper is much easier to learn.

- The features you want (that aren't available)

* Null value attributes - http://jira.nhibernate.org/browse/NH-311
* A "Count" method on ICriteria. That is, it would be nice to create an ICriteria, and then be able to execute a "GetCount()" type of method against it, so that it can be used for paging.

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?

It's not so hard once you know where to look for answers (forums, other people's examples, Hibernate documentation). I think the hardest thing to find though are answers to specific questions; the ones I struggled with the most were:

* What's the best practice for uisng NHibernate in an ASP.NET application? There are lots of different examples of ways you CAN do it, but is there a recommend/best way?

* How do I query a many-to-many relationship, eg. Tables A, B, AB - where table AB is NOT mapped (i.e. I don't have an "AB" object), and I want all the A's that have a certain property from B.

* Nullable types, default values, etc - see jira above.

- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?

Maybe port the Hibernate HQL documentation to better reflect which parts are available in NHibernate.

- What kind of samples / demo applications? With which features?

* As many different keys as possible
* Lazy loading
* ASP.NET "best practices" - something like a simple user manager, or blogging software, or a bug tracker would be a good template.
* HQL - start simple then get more complex

Hope that helps! Overall I think you've all done an awesome job; I love using NHibernate, and am trying to recruit as many people as I can to use it too :-)

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
Well I'm developing (with a team obviously) a Windows Forms application with posibilities of porting to a Web App. We're still using NH0.6 (We started on January) and it certainly works!!!! We

Here is a "form" you can fill if you want to give your opinion / suggestions about NHibernate
Note that these information will heavily influence our future works, so don't hesitate to stress what is important for you ;)

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
:Windows, Web and Mobile Device Applications over Webservices. :)

:Project1 provides smart clients for inner office use and web clients for roving sales people and customer use. Also integration with exchange on the server and outlook on the client. We are looking at mobile device integration at the moment.

:Project2 which is still in development is split between Windows, Web Applications, mobile detached devices, and integration with other vertical applications. It uses detached hand held scanners, and detached depot transaction managers. We will also move into GPRS and GPS as the the market dictates. Like the first project everything connects through webservices, and NHibernate manages the entire Data Access on the backend.

* How would you qualify these softwares?
- Professional / Commercial
- Highly scalable, performant, secure, reliable, ... Enterprise Application Wink

* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?
:Open source, fully featured, the strong Java background, constant stream of updates and enhancments, and most importantly nhibernate is a cool name :)

:Started with 0.3 about a year ago and went from there. I've worked with OO Databases before and I was looking for something that was going to be flexible and good performance wise. I also wanted something that exposed enough object graph detail that we could build our automated graph based search engine on top of it.

- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple
:Changing a big chunk of a object heirarchy/graph organisation without needing to change the db at all :)

- The features you want (that aren't available)
:An easy way to use typed collections. Mainly for use over webservices and detached info. At the moment I have a collectionproxy which converts between typed and NHibernate collections as required. This ends up slowing everything down a lot as NHibernate loses specific info about what has been changed, and has to do a full refresh. So yeah, detachable, typeable, xml-serializable collections would be very nice :)

:Subclassable components.

(Wishlist)
:Interfaces.
:Abstract base classes (without unique identifiers)

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?
:It's gotten a lot easier since the 0.3 days. The hardest part is fully groking ORM, not NHibernate in particular. The info with exceptions has always been extremly helpful.

If you have anything else to add ... :)

:Congrats and thank you for what you have managed to achive so far!

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
web apps, libs and services (also part of an extended framework). Deployed on windows platforms.

* How would you qualify these softwares?
proffesional/commercial trying to be secure and reliable :).

* NHibernate experiences?
Best satsified my needs (i took about a month at some time to evaluate as many free orm's and found your to be the best).

There are some things, but I don't quite remeber (only that I would really like unions, constat expression in hql and subcriteria)

What I don't like is that it sometimes is a little bit unstable (I\m now trying to use it on oracle after I have used it with sql server a lot) and I also don't like the exceptions that are sometimes very vague. But thank god we have logging and source code for that ;).

At least what I like al I can say is "What's not to like about it!" :D.

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)

Learning curve is rather steep. I can't really say what I did to learn using it but I did. And also have (and had) to train others to use it. It's by example any way. I have not recently studied the matterials on NHibernate so I can't say if now there are many enough, but at the start of this year there waren't many of them.

What I want to add
Keep up the good work ... hopefully at some point I will be able to contribute somehow to this project because you and the project did enough for me.

All the best,

NON-Mission-critical intranet enterprise app for fortune 500 company in US



Nice, very nice:
1. database independent
2. flexible with HQL, saves me hours of writing/debugging stored proc
3. popular among java developer - so, it's big - dont want to use anything that's "not-so-popular" because it would not help MY career as experience with unpopular things is not very transferable.

But...
1. sometimes exceptions is very misleading... and dont quite
2. .NET ADO 2.0 Object Space - how's NHibernate going to measure up against this? Anyone?[/quote]

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?

Mostly Web applications using layered business Libraries / Services

+ Details about the development & production environments.

Using DB2
Planning to migrate to .NET 2.0 ASAP
Enterprise Library

* How would you qualify these softwares?

Professional projects
NOT a goal to be highly scalable & performant
Goal: dynamic & very agile

* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?

Needed an OO persistence layer.
Evaluated multiple frameworks available for .NET and found NH to be the most feature complete, with more community work backing it

- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple

Impacted "heavy" OO design changes in both DB and model in one day (with existing unit tests working at end of day)

- The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)
Like:

very complete feature set
True DB platform independence
NO (or minimal) impact of using NHibernate on the Business entities code

Dislike:

not (yet) idiomatic (ie not using .NET to the full extent possible)
NO support for strongly typed collections

+ the pros & cons (that you have to deal with when using NHibernate)
pros:

too many things to list :wink:
Well architected I would say

cons:

Usage of Log4Net (very good but we must use EntLib...)

- The features you want (that aren't available)

.NET 2.0 support (eg. support for generics)
Pluggable Logging
Support for DB specific features (eg. support for stored procedures)

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?

Very difficult to find good .NET "QuickStarts" (but eventually found Scott Bellware's "NHibernate makes me happy !"...)

- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?

More "how to"'s
Integration with ASP.NET

- What kind of samples / demo applications? With which features?

ASP.NET

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
- Windows Forms application mainly, with VS 2003 and .Net 1.1 (hopefully moving to 2.0/VS2005 as soon as possible).

* How would you qualify these softwares?
- Professional / Commercial

* NHibernate experiences?
I compared a few ORM, and I liked the support and user base for Hibernate. Plus, other developers in the office were using hibernate, so NHibernate seemed like a good choice.
- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple
Not having to write SQL for simple and boring select/insert/updates!
- The features you want (that aren't available)
Better list binding with Windows Forms

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?
All the help available for Hibernate really helped a lot. Also Hibernate In Action was very helpful.

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
- Windows Applications
- Web Applications
- Libraries / Services

+ Details about the development & production environments.
== Castle MicroKernel, Windows 2k3, .Net 1.1


* How would you qualify these softwares?
- Professional / Commercial


* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?
== Free and it rocks
- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple
== Refactoring code accross tables

- The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)
== Pros
Not haveing to write SQL code rocks

== Cons
Exceptions are horrible obtuse
- log messages have too much noise if the exception messages would just say this type or that type or that config file it would really help.

- The features you want (that aren't available)
== Generic Collection support - HUGE
== Integration with System.Transaction

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?
== Easy
- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?
== Collections
== Components
== Composite Keys

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
- Web Applications
+ Intranet applications connecting to MSSQL
+ Future plans to look at converting classic ASP storefront to ASP.NET/NHibernate.
+ Environment is VS 2003 / MSSQL 2000/2005b.

* How would you qualify these softwares?
- Pet projects
- Professional / Commercial

* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?
- I scouted around, initially looking at codegen tools for the data layer. I started with the Microsoft DAAB blocks and the Data Mapper. I didn't seem to get on well with this item. Then scouted round and found the wonderful tool from Frans Bouma's weblog, LLBLGen Pro. The documentation was great, the demo seemed to perform well, it had good forums, good backend support....can't complain (can't remember why I didn't go with this one....) somehow got sidetracked with objectspaces and the variable shipping date....then came across nHibernate. Initially was putoff by what I felt was a steep learning curve, grabed the hibernate in action and made my life a bit easier. From there I have loved working with the product.

- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple

It is so simple to codegen databases and have the classes written with either the codesmith or www.mygeneration.com tools. (the latter I have now settled on using and is a wonderful help to getting the base class code out the door) Working with the data as objects was more intuitive that my experience with the Microsoft data mapper and its policies with mapping data. NHibernate just 'felt right'.

The Cons....
I wish NHibernate worked (better) across multiple databases/datasources when establishing inter-db-relations. I did get stuck for a while (we have many cases where users are stored in one database and the data they reference in another database and are linked relationly), but someone posted notes in this forum on referencing the databases by their server.name.dbo.table (for MSSQL) syntax in the config files and this has worked well!!! Magic, my major bug bear fixed... It would be nice to get official multi database relationship support.!!!

The nullables support in the contrib pack has been a mandatory requirement. No troubles with using it.

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?
Felt the experience was initially hard (my experience with object coding was to blame). Coming from a non object environment I felt it taxing on the poor noggin. Having a bit more sample code to fiddle with I believe would've accelerated the noggin-to-code filtration ratio.
But it's quickly becoming easier after a few months use. Staying close in line with the Java crew makes the standard hibernate material a good source of info, I especially recommend the Hibernate in Action book as a good starting point.

- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?
Not sure.

- What kind of samples / demo applications? With which features?
Would think some sort of starterkit for asp.net may be useful. Perhaps in the vein of the microsoft starter kits like ibuyspy or a generic portal application (like the cuyahoga (spelling??) one)

If decent starter kits are developed, the community has the option to build on them, sort of what has occured for the ms starter kits (some examples where this occured with the ms stuff is the dotnetnuke community). Perhaps even grabbing the existing kits and massaging them into a nHibernate mutated existance.


All in all I feel the community here is a excelling building block for nHibernate. The developers are doing a fantastic job on nHibernate, it works well beyond my expectations. :D

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?

- Web Applications
- Libraries / Services

+ Details about the development & production environments.

- development : Win XP prof. , Win 2k3 , IIS 5/6, MSSql 2k , MySql , Postgres, Visual studio 2003, .net Framework 1.1
- production : Win 2k server - IIS 5, MSDE, MySql ; going to deploy one app to Debian Linux/ mono/ MySql soon

* How would you qualify these softwares?

- Professional / Commercial

* NHibernate experiences?
- Why have you selected NHibernate?

Multi-database support ; rescue from writing and maintaining those thousands lines of ugly sql
Why NHibernate over other O/Rs ? Good licence, very good Java Hibernate fame , rapid growth of NH

- Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple

No-touch multi-database support

- The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)

Hard to specify what I especially like - all the features are equally awesome.
Only complaint -> lack of complete NH specific documentation => need to use that not-always-100% comptatibile Hibernate docs. (but I know - it is growing and I'm happy with that)

+ the pros & cons (that you have to deal with when using NHibernate)

pros:
easy to learn, near 100% major bugs-free, just works :)

cons:
sometimes hard to understand exception messages (but mayby the problem lies on my side ) e.g. i've spent sooooo many hours trying to find out why my 'char' discriminator fails .....
http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3045530

- The features you want (that aren't available)

For now - NH has everything I really need. ( doesn't make coffee but it isn't a big problem ;) )

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?

For me it was rather easy (I started with 0.5 version and Hibernate docs).

- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?

Generally if NH docs reaches Hibernate docs level it is fine. The only thing is not good documented is "Expressions" in "HQL" part - how to deal with date/time types, how to access indices/elements in collections - personally I had much guessing here

- What kind of samples / demo applications? With which features?

no idea here, sorry

btw. BIG thanks for so great tool, you are the best, guys :D

First thing:
:D CONGRATULATIONS for NHibernate!!
:D NHibernate rocks!!

What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?

- Windows Applications (trying to make smart client apps with NHib)
- Web Applications
- Libraries / Services (web services and windows services)

Details about the development & production environments:

- Development:
Win XP Pro & 2003 Server, IIS 5 & 6, MS SQL Server 2K (evaluating 2005 version and liking access like operation as a file), Visual studio 2003 & evaluating 2005 beta 2 (generics are very powerfull), subversion
Migration to .NET 2.0 ASAP!!! PLEASE MAKE NHibernate work well with it!
- Production :
Win 2000 and 2003 server, IIS 5 & 6, MS SQL Server 2000

How would you qualify these softwares?

- Some pet projects
- Professional intranet (web and smart client) enterprise applications, non mission critical

NHibernate experiences?
Why have you selected NHibernate? Why over other O/Rs ?

Have been using Evaluant DTM before: PRO: Very fast development when no business logic, CONS: not so fast performance, no support for fine grained model (could only persist value types as binary), hard to implement and change coplex domain logic (generated classes where in C# and preferred development language is VB.NET), very hard to test business logic, no updates in a long time, apparently no .NET 2.0 support plans.
Looked and liked Wilson OR Mapper, but seemed a "lite" version of NHibernate.
Other O/R mappers don't help with rich domain models (are more DB like).

Why NHibernate:
- Keeps domain logic clean and testable, lets developers concentrate in one thing at a time, first making domain model work, then making a good database (relational guy hat on) and mapping to it, and finally making it usable on UI.
- You really can put all the OO design patterns in the domain model and persist it.
- Has multi-database support
- Don't need to write SQL code (maybe just a little sometimes)
- Free
- Excellent Java Hibernate reputation and popularity
- Apparently alive and growing community of NHibernate (which meens support available)
- The way of making apps with NHibernate just feels right

Something you have done that you never thought would be possible / simple

Test domain model with no database
Make heavy refactoring on domain model and easily adapt DB

The features you like / dislike (=> should be improved)

- Like all the features
- Dislikes:
Not (yet) idiomatic (ie not using .NET 1.x and 2.0 to the full extent possible)
No support for strongly typed collections

The pros & cons (that you have to deal with when using NHibernate)
- PRO: A pretty well tested library
- CON: I personally miss typed collections autogenerated by Evaluant DTM, but not so bad because of .NET 2.0 generics (currently not supported out of the box and contrib sollutions not entirely satisfactory)

The features you want (that aren't available)
In order:
THE 3 URGENT ONES:
1) .NET 2.0 nullables and generics support out of the box.
2) Windows forms binding support for IList, and some solution for IDictionaries and ISet. (To the guys on ObjectViews: finish it please! here's my wish list: Support for IDictionary and ISet, .net 2.0 generic collections for IList, IDictionary and ISet)
3) Some way to do transparent lazy loading of collections in windows forms (forum solutions aren't very good- transparent)
NOT URGENT:
4) Xml-serializable collections
5) Support for SQL Server 2005 (maybe already works haven't tested it but planning to)

About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
- How easy/hard is it to learn using NHibernate?

Personally pretty easy, but hard for some collegues with more "structured-non 00-table module-heads", mainly because the object thinking switch needed, once they get it they like it.
Reading "Hibernate in Action" is a great help and highly recommended.

- What are the parts you would like to see better documented?

Specific implementation details for web (ASP.NET) and windows forms (I am not working with JSP servlets so Hibernate docs, patterns and best practices don't work very much for me.

- What kind of samples / demo applications? With which features?
Same as above

Thanks guys for this very 8) software.

Hector Cruz
Mexico City, Mexico

* What kind of software do you mainly develop with NHibernate?
- Enterprise Web App: ASP.NET 1.1, mix of VB.NET and C#. SQL 2000. This is a mission critical system for evaluating the Argentinian "social security" models.
-
* How would you qualify these software?
As of version 1.0 I consider it to be Professional / Commercial grade. It is still missing a few features to make it more performing

* NHibernate experiences?
I selected Nhibernate because I trusted hibernate as a mature project and liked that NH was following on hibernates footsteps so I can use the available documentation on the web. Also I needed and ORM because it was used in a big enterprise app with complex math so doing our own persistence was very costly.
Regarding the missing features I would definitely put performance on top of the list, especially batch update/delete and a distributed cache (maybe using EntLib cache??). Second on the list are features that it should be more integrated with the .NET platform: DataSets, examples of how to use it with Serviced Component (transaction enlisting, etc).
As its major strength is its simplicity (HQL) and stability.

* About the documentation? (We are currently working hard to improve it...)
This is definitely a part that should improve. Documentation should help jumpstart NH since the learning curve for some spoiled MS programmers (DataSets, designers and other bad/easy things)

Keep up the good work!