NHibernate 3 - what is the status?

Question

I am an NHibernate newbie so I apologize if there is an obvious answer to this that I'm missing.

I see some questions on SO and some blog posts referring to NHibernate 3. But when I go to nhforge.org, it looks like the current downloads are for 2.1.2. Is 3 still a work in progress? Are there betas available somewhere? Documentation? Is there an established timeframe / roadmap for 3.X?

Answer 1

It hasn't been released yet. I believe it's still in the alpha stage, as per the wiki

And actually, after listening to Hanselminutes Podcast 225 - Learning about NHibernate 3 with Jason Dentler, http://nhforge.org/ is a great place to get all the information you're looking for.

Answer 2

You can find some information about NH3 from this podcast

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast225LearningAboutNHibernate3WithJasonDentler.aspx

You can also find the source for the project on source Forge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate/files/

Answer 3

Check their website.

You can download ALPHA binaries there: http://nhforge.org/media/p/690.aspx

Answer 4

You can download the latest NHibernate 3.0 Alpha from Sourceforge and view the roadmap / change log for the project on the NHibernate Issue Tracker.

Answer 5

If you click on the "Download Now NH 2.1.2" link on the NHForge home page, that will bring you to the download location for NH 3.0 Alpha 2 source and binaries.

http://nhforge.org/

For release notes, see this thread from the NH user's group (basically, release notes are available in the download):

http://groups.google.com/group/nhusers/browse_thread/thread/e0cc47b01207b5ae/ef89fb5218e46fd7?lnk=raot&fwc=1&pli=1

Here is an NHibernate features page. Some, but not all, of the 3.0 features are called out here:

http://nhforge.org/wikis/howtonh/nhibernate-features.aspx

The NHibernate documentation is here:

http://nhforge.org/doc/nh/en/index.html

But the documentation doesn't appear to have been updated for NHibernate 3.0 yet. Most of the 3.0 features have documentation available on various blog posts that you can find through Google searches. I'm sure the project would love to have a volunteer pull all the documentation together in one place.

The timeframe / roadmap for NHibernate 3.0 to be officially released is whenever the important bugs have all been fixed. You can watch the progress on bug fixes on the NHibernate JIRA:

http://216.121.112.228/browse/NH

Like most software, NHibernate 3.0 will be released when "it's ready". Here's a quote from Fabio, the project lead for NHibernate:

Roadmap: we hope to fix all of the actual existing open issues but because we know that it will be impossible we can only say you that we will release NH3 before the end of this year.

(Source: http://groups.google.com/group/nhusers/msg/40769ab8b95750fc)

From the NHUsers mailing list, it sounds like quite a few people are running NH 3.0 in production.