Last night I sat in on a LiveMeeting session hosted by Chad Myers and Zach Young, both Chad and Zach have both been working with others on the Fluent NHibernate project. This was an awesome discussion and Chad did a great job demonstrating NHibernate and how Fluent NHibernate is trying to fill the gap for programmatically create the NHibernate configuration instead of creating the XML files.
As Chad explained Fluent NHibernate is an API for creating NHibernate mappings programmatically instead of using XML configuration files. Its goal is to reduce the difficulties faced when incorporating NHibernate in a project by providing improved readability, testing capabilities, and compile time safety.
I have just started trying to learn NHibernate and after working through a few projects definitely can see how a lot of time is creating the XML configuration and mapping files. After viewing what Fluent NHibernate I plan on working through a few of the applications and convert them to see how well it works.
Related post by Chad Myers:
Fluent NHibernate – Configuration
Related post by Zach Young:
Does the Fluent NHibernate create static XML mapping files?
The NHibernate Project
The Fluent NHibernate Project
James Gregory also has a great article Introducing the Fluent NHibernate