NHibernate and Spring.NET Combination really helpful in the enterprise level application!

Question

What are the opinions of the software developers who have used Spring.NET and NHibernate in their projects? In couple of our projects in the company where I work, we have used these third party tools very extensively and we have gained tremendous productivity. A little caveat is that it is a little challenging for junior .Net Developer to grasp the concept.

Answer 1

NHibernate (or similar ORM's) can be extremely helpful with "greenfield" development, where the domain object model can be designed properly, and then the database schema and NHibernate mappings can be code-generated to match the model. On the other hand, NHibernate can be very tough to apply to a legacy or poorly normalized database. Although it has support for handling some unusual data structures, the learning curve is much higher for those techniques.

I can't say much about Spring.Net except that in 2007, our team tried to implement it into an existing, complex solution to handle DB transactions and entity validation, but we scrapped the idea after a week of work. Our resident Spring/Java expert concluded that Spring.Net was a couple versions behind Spring and wasn't mature enough to handle the use cases in our project. Disclaimer: not sure what version of Spring.Net that was, so things may have improved recently.

Answer 2

Imo, Spring.Net and NHibernate go hand in hand: If you master the learning curve you will be very pleased when Spring is used for (almost transparent) transaction handling for NHibernate, Dependency Injection as well as Db:Provider handling.

Answer 3

We are planning to use NHibernate with Spring.NET. I hope we don't make a mockery out of the project.