NHibernate - Good or Bad Idea?

[Jacobus01]

Hi, My company has now decided that we developers now have to bring in a persistence layer in our applications(mostly c#.net,wpf and ASP.net). Previously I wrote my own entity classes and had a common data class handle all my database transactions. This data class used Corelab's Unidirect to generate sql for a vast multitude of DBs and defined the way in which you are to communicate with the database. Now I have to implement Nhibernate. I've never used it before and apparently it makes our job as developers easier. I do not yet know whether this is the case and so far it has only complicated things. Can anybody tell me if Nhibernate is worth the effort as I don not yet know the product well enough to make a conclusion. The learning curve is messing with my productivity.

[Bassam Saoud]

It is very hard to answer your question. NHibernate is a very large open source project, it will take everyone much time to make use of it in a good way. Like any framework, simply using it doesnt mean you are using it effeciently. yet once you learn it and there are many articles here in CP, it will bring great value and ease to your team. Now that being said, there are other Microsoft framework that may be worth digging into like Entity Framework but I am not expert on EF so I cannot recommend it over NHibernate.