To begin elaborating on frameworks and development decisions for the 59 Days of Code contest, the first thing I wanted to invest in was a good and stable OR/M framework.  Initially I was going to go with the new version of Entity Framework 4.0 with .NET but reading a little more into my options, I am going to go with Fluent NHibernate. If you are unaware, Fluent NHibernate is an excellent OR/M tool that allows you to declare your mappings to your database in a more fluent way through code, instead of tedious XML configuration files.  This makes your life a lot easier.  Plus, you get the benefit of very abstracted code which allows me to easier plugin a test framework (more on that later). To setup and configure Fluent NHibernate, first I created a NHibernate Session object helper:

private static ISessionFactory SessionFactory
{
	get
	{
		if (_sessionFactory == null)
		{
			_sessionFactory = Fluently.Configure()
				.Database(FluentNHibernate.Cfg.Db.MsSqlConfiguration.MsSql2008.ConnectionString(c => c.FromConnectionStringWithKey("MyDbConnFromWebConfig")))
				.Mappings(m => m.AutoMappings.Add(AutoMap.AssemblyOf<User>().Where(t => t.Namespace == "Namespace.Data.Entities")
				.Setup(s => s.FindIdentity = property => property.Name == property.DeclaringType.Name + "Id")))
				.BuildSessionFactory();
		}
		return _sessionFactory;
	}
}

public static ISession OpenSession()
{
	return SessionFactory.OpenSession();
}

What this does is basically use a singleton pattern to use NHibernate to map my data class library to my database. For example here is what my User class looks like:

public class User
{
	public virtual long UserId { get; private set; }
	public virtual DateTime CreatedDateTime { get; set; }
	public virtual long CreatedUserId { get; set; }
	public virtual DateTime ModifiedDateTime { get; set; }
	public virtual long ModifiedUserId { get; set; }
	public virtual DateTime LastActivityDateTime { get; set; }
	public virtual int UserRoleId { get; set; }
	public virtual string Username { get; set; }
	public virtual string Email { get; set; }
	public virtual string Password { get; set; }
	public virtual string Firstname { get; set; }
	public virtual string Lastname { get; set; }
	public virtual bool Enabled { get; set; }
}

In addition to that, you can also see I am using AutoMapping and setting up my entity identities by mapping the column to EntityName + “Id” so for users it would be UserId.

Without going too much into my architecture I want to quickly explain how I am using this session factory from my repositories to actually get the data. This part is where NHibernate gets fun. Now say I want to get a user by Username and Password. Now I just do something like the following:

using (ISession session = NHibernateHelper.OpenSession())
{
	User user = session.CreateCriteria<User>().Add(Restrictions.Eq("Username", username)).Add(Restrictions.Eq("Password", password)).UniqueResult<User>();
}

Bam! That’s it. NHibernate will automatically create your mappings and map the results back to your class. A lot of the build in methods they provide are very cool and allow me to fluently wite my queries without doing any plain text SQL or stored procedures.

Next I am looking into caching with NHibernate, as they have hooks into the ASP.NET cache provider and so forth.

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