I would like to have NHibernate get & set our entity values directly through their fields, rather than through their properties. It would seem to offer better performance.

More importantly, though, it would allow entities to get loaded by NHibernate that have values considered "illegal" by the property setter, so that they could be cleaned without resorting to direct SQL. These "illegal" values could occur even if only NHibernate saved data to the database, if validation rules in a property setter were tightened up after some entities were already persisted.

Members of our design team are very concerned about letting NHibernate access private fields through reflection. They say Microsoft has admitted that this capability is a bug and will eventually be removed. Is this true? Is anyone else using field access rather than property access?

The fact that this feature has existed for a long time in Java suggests to me that the Java world does not consider access to private fields through reflection a "bug", and has no intention of removing the capability ...

Oh yeah -- another reason I'd like to use field access rather than property access is that then you can expose the entity Ids as read-only properties. If we have to set up our mappings to use property access, then we have to put setters on the Id properties, and have them throw exceptions if the previous value is not null and not equal to the value to set. (Using "no-setter" won't help, since that still accesses private fields through reflection, which is supposedly going to be taken away by Microsoft ...)

I can not help you, however, I really can not believe that setting private fields through reflection is a 'bug'. When using reflection you even have bindingflags for private access and this is well documented.

Taking away this feature would break almost all non-trivial applications.

Therefor, I would not think twice about it, and just use reflection.

Hmm, private member reflection is already controlled by security settings, so I don't understand why it should be completely removed. Do you have any link where somebody from MS says the capability is going away?

That's what I think, too. I'll have to check with the other members on my design team to find out what all the fuss is about :?