Learn How to use NHibernate with the Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series
I'm a huge fan of screencasts for learning. There are an increasing number of increasingly sophisticated tools and libraries that we as developers have available and I'm leaning on screencasts to learn them. I really like the screencasts that Rob Conery is doing and I've got really positive response from the ASP.NET MVC Screencasts.
I'm starting to think that all technical books should come with a accompanying screencast series. You typically have to watch closely and pay attention, and it's hard to watch a screencast in double speed (unlike a podcast) but a well-done screencast is the next-best thing to letting an expert take over your computer and show you.
There are many tools that support the fundamental tenets, beliefs, and preferred processes in the ALT.NET space. Certainly ALT.NET isn't "all about the tools," but there are certainly preferred tools.
One of those is NHibernate, a sophisticated Object Relational Mapper. I used NHibernate as my Data Layer recently when I got ASP.NET MVC running under .NET 2.0 using NHibernate examples from Davy Brion (who has an NHibernate Category on his blog).
NHibernate is very flexible, but it's a little overwhelming (for me, at least) to get started. Davy has a good "code-heavy" walkthrough of the concepts. Some NHibernate write-ups assume too much, IMHO.
Perhaps to combat this, Stephen Bohlen has created the Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series as a learning tool to educate engineers at his company. Stephen says:
"Often, our strategy for bringing people up to speed on [NHibernate] has been to rely on word-of-mouth and osmosis (often via pair-programming) to get the points across, but now we have a planned staffing ramp-up of a magnitude that will likely make that approach unwieldy."
He's releasing these screencasts to the public and you can check them out at http://www.summerofnhibernate.com/ or subscribe to the feed and get them downloaded automatically like podcasts! Stephen's also including Code Downloads with each screencast.
If you like them, remember that Stephen's doing this for free, while bandwidth isn't, so you can donate via Paypal to help him out. You can visit Stephen's blog with comments and suggestions. My primary suggestions to him would be to drop his resolution to 1024x768 or even 800x600 (what I do) and raise his font size to Lucida Console 16. Right now, you'll need a high-res (1280) monitor to watch his screencasts.
These small nits aside, I think it's great that NHibernate is getting more screencasts that really help folks get started and augment NHibernate's excellent documentation.
Related Links
- Official NHibernate Home
- Online NHibernate Docs
- NHibernate Docs (PDF)
- Official NHibernate Forum
- NHUsers Google Group
- ALT.NET Yahoo Group
- NHibernate FAQ Blog
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Also if you see Phil Winstanley around, say hello from me :)
Check his blog for a list of tools he uses in his IDE.
I feel like NHibernate takes too long to train everybody in. Also, the queries are much harder to read than LINQ.
Scott, what do you use to make screencast? Any good recommendation?
It would a formidable asset for teaching new employee with new technologies.
So? What about the MVP at Microsoft? What are you using?
The screencast of Rob Conery are also really well done, I'll ask him too what software he's using. :)
I can't see any harm in supporting such a community-minded gesture with a few of my own dollars. Hopefully more people can be encouraged to do this sort of thing. (I have just started trying to do it myself and the more the merrier!)
Screencasts truly are the best way to learn rapidly. Particularly for those who develop in isolation as individuals or as part of a small (or under-skilled) team
Another good series is Ben Scheirman's series "A Journey With NHibernate" at http://is.gd/X2e - this was recommended to me by MHinze while discussing the Summer series on twitter. It is a good read as well!
Does NHibernate have LINQ?
I feel like NHibernate takes too long to train everybody in. Also, the queries are much harder to read than LINQ.
Ayende is working on Linq to NHibernate - http://www.hookedonlinq.com/LINQToNHibernate.ashx
Yes, NHibernate is somewhat harder to use, but it is also a lot more complete, and has quite a different focus. Linq2Sql is primarily about making your SQL Server database queryable through LINQ, whereas NHibernate focuses on being an O/R mapper.
http://codebetter.com/files/folders/codebetter_downloads/entry180972.aspx
Cheers,
JF
<mutterUnderBreath>the UN should do something about hemispherical prejudice</mutterUnderBreath
I agree screencasts are a great way to provide learning material for developers. My employer Falafel Software announced the release of Telerik Trainer at TechEd this year which is a WPF application that delivers screencasts on steroids. Falafel developed it for Telerik and it's available for free download here.
Telerik Trainer incorporates screencasts that have live code links and can launch you into VS.NET on the currect code example while the video is playing among other features.
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