When I first started learning and using NHibernate, I read every tutorial, downloaded every example, and studied every code snippet I could get my hands on. There are some great resources available with one of the best being Billy McCafferty's NHibernate Best Practices.
In my opinion, the majority of the resources available fall into one of three categories:
- Articles that expect and require some familiarity with NHibernate.
- Articles or snippets/sample code that are written at such a low level, you're left wondering how the technique demonstrated would be implemented in real world code.
- Open source code that dissecting and learning from would be a daunting and tedious task for users new to the concept of NHibernate.
Each of the resources I refer to provide a lot of useful information. However, I like to learn by doing and I think a tutorial that provides a step by step guide to implementing NHibernate in a real world application would be beneficial to a lot of prospective NHibernate users.
In an attempt to fill this void, this is the first article in a series of many. Each article will cover a bite-sized (byte-sized?) step in the process as we design and implement a blog. We will finish with an application that is simple enough that we don't get bogged down in unrelated topics but complex enough that in the end we will have a framework that can be used as the foundation for future projects.
In Part II we will build our domain classes.