Greetings,
I have a windows forms application that uses hibernate. The application is structured in a layered way UI / Business Logic / Data Access Layer each mapping to an assembly. The objects mapped to by hibernate are in a separate assembly as well (common data objects).

The UI assembly doesn't have any references to hibernate objects (i.e. session, factory, etc.) all of these are in the business logic assembly. There is an app.config file in the UI assembly with all the hibernate configurations and the assembly has references to the business logic assembly and the common data objects assembly.

The problem is that after I added a reference to the Business Logic assembly (which has hibernate references) and added a reference to NHibernate in the UI (for the config to load properly), I can no longer edit my main form in the designer.

When I open the main form, all my user controls get removed from the designer and I get the following errors:

An exception occurred while trying to create an instance of TestUserControl The exception was "The dialect was not set. Set the property hibernate.dialect.".

If I try to add an instance of any user control from my UI to the main form, I get the same exception and the control is not added.

Do I need to set any configurations manually for the designer to work properly?

If i don't open the form in the designer; the application works fine and no exceptions are thrown.

Thanks
Mario

It looks like the designer try to create a SessionFactory or something like that...

Check the constructor and the InitComp() methods to be sure that they don't contain NHibernate code.

Anyway, you shouldn't need to add a reference to NHibernate.dll in your WinApp. If you really want to separate them, but the NHibernate configuration in a "hibernate.cfg.xml" file...

Thanks for the response KPixel.

I don't have any hibernate code in the constructor or initcomp; the UI doesn't have any hibernate code at all.

If i want to put all the configuration in an xml file along with the Business Logic layer where i think it should be. How do I load it when initializing the factory?

thanks
mario

If the file is "hibernate.cfg.xml", call cfg.Configure();
else call cfg.Configure("file name here");

Tell me if you find out why your designer don't work.

Can I rename my app.config to hibernate.cfg.xml, move it to my bin/debug directory and it should work? I think that I may have to change the format?

Simply renaming it probably won't work, hibernate.cfg.xml has to have the right format (<hibernate-configuration> tag, right namespace, <session-factory> and <property> tags, etc.). But yes, if it's in bin/Debug folder NH should find it.