This book explains many features of NHibernate 4 in detail through example recipes that you can quickly apply to your applications. These recipes will take you from the absolute basics of NHibernate through its most advanced features and beyond, showing you how to take full advantage of each concept to quickly create amazing database applications.
Chapter 1, The Configuration and Schema, explains various methods for configuring NHibernate and generating your database.
Chapter 2, Models and Mappings, introduces mappings in both XML and code, and includes more advanced topics such as versioning and concurrency.
Chapter 3, Sessions and Transactions, covers several techniques for proper session and transaction management in your application, including distributed transactions.
Chapter 4, Queries, demonstrates a number of rich query APIs, including the LINQ provider and the QueryOver API.
Chapter 5, Improving Performance, lets you know how to reduce application startup time by using serialized configuration. We also dig deep into how caching and advanced querying techniques can improve the performance of your application.
Chapter 6, Testing, introduces some techniques you can apply to quickly test your NHibernate applications and includes an introduction to NHibernate Profiler.
Chapter 7, Data Access Layer, shows how to build a flexible, extensible data access layer based on NHibernate and its many query APIs.
Chapter 8, Extending NHibernate, shows a number of ways to customize and extend NHibernate to provide additional services such as audit logging and data encryption.
Chapter 9, NHibernate Contribution Projects, introduces several NHibernate Contribution projects, adding features such as caching, data validation, full text search, geospatial data, and horizontal partitioning of databases.