Since I first started with NHibernate, I felt apprehensive about the Iesi.Collections.dll. The source is an unknown quantity, at least not someone I've ever heard of and I always felt weird about it. This is not meant as any disrespect to Jason (the original author of the CodeProject article), but it wasnt until just yesterday that I realized who the source was (and, yes, I *now* also realize that the attribution is in the license text file). Before then, it was just a mystery to me and I avoided using Sets for just that reason.

In any case, what is the benefit of having the ISet interface live in a separate namespace and DLL? NHibernate has deep ties to it, the code has been extended and changed from the original. The license is sufficiently broad that there can be no question (that I could think of) about just moving the code into the NHibernate.Core namespace and retaining attribution in the comments. Why not just do it?

Is anyone else bothered by this?

-MT

My problem is that he did not provide any indexers on any of the sets. I dont know if this was by design or not but you can't use a for each on every collection becuase of adding and deleting objects from teh collection. So being a collection without an indexer kind of looks like it was developed with a VB 6.0 mentality... At least it doesn't appear to have been run through the ringer in .NET anyway...

Sets are unordered, so it isn't meaningful for them to have an indexer. How do you define mySet[i]? And how do you ensure that mySet[i] stays the same if you save an object and reload it later?

Thats where I get confused... if a Set is unordered then why does it have a Sort attribute on the xml tag to sort the items? Why is a bag, which is unordered, represented by a IList which is ordered? Why can't I have a sort tag on a bag?

I agree with mteper... the whole set thing is just bizarre. But I would go farther. I say, ditch the whole Iesi ISet thing and lets just use IList for everything. Just let the hbm tag - bag or list - determine if order is important or not.

I'll turn it around - why don't ordered/sorted sets have an indexer? I'd say it's because they still only implement ISet (there is no IOrderedSet), and so they can't have one.


Because there is no bag collection neither in Java nor in .NET, so a list has to be used.


I don't know, I guess there's no technical reason why not, so if you want it, request it.


I don't see the point in removing ISet. Why all that destruction? :-) If you are missing some feature, why not just add it?

I'm not sure where my message went, but *I* am not advocating destruction. I just want to see *Set / ISet rolled into an appropriate NHibernate namespace.

-MT

I don't want to combine Iesi.Collections with NH, in fact I'd rather separate it into a project of its own.