Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer

Good stuff, I'm also very interested in your object-object mapping testing capabilities.

I've thought about doing it myself but couldn't work out how to do it for more complex cases, so definitely interested to see what you guys have produced.

As I told James...finally and NHibernate I can get on board with.  For years I've been screaming that XML configuration file != better application - for our team, on the application that we inherited, it result in more production runtime bugs then any other application I had ever worked on (until we got rid of 80% of configuration files and 100% of all the extra interfaces that were created solely for the 'abstraction' of the configuration files).

Anyway, I think this is a great evolutionary step for NHibernate and I'm really looking forward to see this project completed.  My experiences with NHibernate thus far have been nothing but frustration after frustration.

That is definitely a nice and better way to configure NHibernate instead of the xml files.

On a previous project using NHibernate the xml mapping files were also troublesome, problematic, and even confusing to a lot of the developers on the team. Since we also did not have automated tests on them we usually did not know about any issues with the files until we ran the application.

"XML Hell" is one of the main reasons why I no longer use NAnt for my build files and instead use an actual dynamic scripting language (Python) to handle those tasks.

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'XML Hell'   I love that!   Managers will get that too since they're all too familiar with being burnt by DLL hell a decade ago.   I'm using it!

@Ray

Just to say if the project you describe is still around then you can easily verify many aspects of the mapping using this approach:

codebetter.com/.../test-your-nhibernate-mappings.aspx

Ayende has blogged about this sort of thing too.888

I concur with all of the benefits outlined above.

However a plus point for the XML config was that, should your column names change, you could update the mappings and everything would keep working, without the need for a recompile. Assuming you were loading the mappings at runtime rather than compiling them into the assembly of course.

Developers using the fluent interface are closing off this flexibility.