Has anyone used NHydrate ORM?

Question

NHydrate is a lesser-known ORM for .Net - I stumbled across it for the first time yesterday.

They have a good amount of information on their Codeplex page, and a several videos that are also quite informative.

After reading through the docs and watching some of the videos I feel very curious about this ORM. Model driven development, a la LLBLGen appeals to me quite a bit, and in particular I am enticed by NHydrate's ability to cleanly query across related objects with LINQ Expressions (after fighting miserably, and mostly unsuccessfully, with SubSonic to achieve the same ability).

So, I would be exceptionally interested in hearing anyone's experience using NHydrate in a project. Have any of you used it and how was your experience with it? I would especially like to know if there are any show-stoppers in anyone's opinion?

Answer 1

Hi, Unfortunately I cannot give you any real world experience of nHydrate as I too am doing an assessment. But I am very impressed in what nHydate has to offer. For the past 4 years I've been using Deklarit which has now been withdrawn from sale, but did MDD all the way up to the UI, and included out of the box role based security. So for me, nHydrate gives me the low level stuff with support for paging and audit trails, and the historic changes to the database for ease of upgrading eventually the production system. But alas leaves me without the higher levels. Sculpture comes close, see www.dawliasoft.com. For the business objects layer I like CSLA, which Sculpture generates and so does t4csla.codeplex.com, but only Sculpture does the UI. Nearly a month after your post I'd love to hear back as to your conclusions and decisions

thanks John

Answer 2

I actually work on the nHydrate project and can answer any questions you have at [email protected]. We have worked very hard to get the LINQ syntax working very well. Also the difference from LLBLGen is the .NET integration. Last time I looked at this product you had to gen to a folder and then manually include files in your .NET project. nHydrate is integrated in the .NET environment and projects are added directly to the IDE. We also have a database installer project that tracks all database changes from your model as well. Your API and database are version and do not get out of sync.

--Chris Davis