NHibernate in Action

Foreword

Somewhere in the middle of 2004, I decided that I needed to take a look at additional ways to deal with persistence, beyond store procedures and code generation using Code Smith. At the time, I was mystified by the all the noise around ORM, business objects, and domain-driven design. I had data sets and stored procedures, and I had code generation to make working with them a bit easier, and the world was good. But as I began to deal with more complex applications and attempted to learn from the collective knowledge in the community, I began to see the problems with this approach.

Eventually, I understood the significant problem with my previous method of working with data: I was building procedural applications, where the data was ...