Free NHibernate helper tools?

Question

Are there any free tools to help simplify working with an NHibernate project in .NET 3.5? Primarily, I'm looking for some kind of code and config file generator to automate some of the more tedious parts of working with NHibernate.

Answer 1

ActiveWriter is a plugin to Visual Studio that generates some files for NHibernate, but I haven't had a chance to dig into it yet.

Answer 2

MyGeneration has some nHibernate tempates for code generation.

There used to be some for the free version of Code-Smith too, but I don't think they have been updated in a while.

Answer 3

NHibernate Query Analyzer is a must for constructing queries. It's not for configuration, I know, but a must when trying to get your head around HQL.

Answer 4

What about an active record implementation with attribute-based definition on top of nhibernate?

Answer 5

Fluent-NHibernate presents an alternative way of writing your mapping, that for example is more refactor friendly than the standard XML approach.

Example:

public CustomerMap : ClassMap<Customer>
{
  public CustomerMap()
  {
    Id(x => x.ID);
    Map(x => x.Name);
    Map(x => x.Credit);
    HasMany<Product>(x => x.Products)
      .AsBag();
    Component<Address>(x => x.Address, m =>  
    {  
        m.Map(x => x.AddressLine1);  
        m.Map(x => x.AddressLine2);  
        m.Map(x => x.CityName);  
        m.Map(x => x.CountryName);  
    });
}

Answer 6

Keep an eye out for Oren (Ayende)'s NHhibernate Profiler:

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/11/04/nh-prof-a-guided-tour.aspx

It is not yet released but it looks very promising.

Answer 7

David Hayden has put together T4 Templates that generate sample Fluent NHibernate Mapping Classes.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/david.hayden/archive/2008/12/14/t4-templates-for-fluent-nhibernate.aspx

Answer 8

what about NConstruct Lite, a small powerfull tool to generating mapping files and Entities...

Answer 9

Have a look at: dPulpo, a datalayer generation tool that generates NHibernate mapping files, C# entity classes and your SQL database. There is a Visual Studio plugin and it's currently in beta and free for download.