Summer of NHibernate Session 01: Setup and Basic Usage Pattern Screencast is Available

I am pleased to announce that the first installment of the Summer NHibernate screencast series is finally available for download!

This first session covers the basic setup and usage patterns of the NHibernate object relational mapping technology and starts with the basics assuming no familiarity on the part of the user with NHibernate at all.  For background on the reasoning behind this video series refer to this previous post.

Screencast Session Outline

Session 1 (6/13): SETUP AND BASIC USAGE PATTERN

  • Get the NHibernate dlls and .xsd files
  • Demonstrate how to add the xsd files to VS XML intellisense capabilities to get syntax support in the XML files
  • Use a simple Customer — Orders — OrderItems style database
  • Hand-code DTO class for the ‘Customer’ table
    • Introduce the concepts of 1:1 relation between table and class
    • (the dumb-DTO pattern; start here since it’s by far the simplest way to work)
  • Hand-code the Customer.hbm.xml mapping file to expose people to this syntax
  • Hand-code the hibernate.cfg.xml file to expose people to this syntax
  • Setup the project in VS (data access class lib)
  • Setup a corresponding test class to go along with it (to be used to exercise the data access class lib)
    • Further demonstrates the value of unit tests as a ‘harness’ for exercising concepts in a safe vacuum
  • Code a simple method that demonstrates the basic mechanics of interacting with NHibernate to retrieve all Customers from the database
    • ISessionFactory, ISession, reading configuration(s)
    • Leveraging the using ( ) {…} block to ensure session is properly closes/disposed of when done

Screencast format and Download Server

So that a high visual quality for sessions can be maintained, these Screencasts are being recorded at a relatively high resolution of 1280×1024 and are projected to run for between an hour and an hour and a half in length.  As such the total download is easily a couple hundred megabytes in size and since I’m too frugal to spring for a for-fee download site for the content I have instead chosen to post the sessions at the www.4Shared.com web site. I have isntead chosen to post the content on the www.drop.io web site. 

4shared.com drop.io is a free content hosting site offering unlimited bandwidth and 5 GB of unlimited concurrent storage but there is a limitation that no single file can exceed 100 MB in individual size.  To circumvent this limitation I will be breaking the Screencast into two or more multipart ZIP files, each one just slightly under 100 MB of capacity.  In order to unzip the AVI file you will need to download all three parts of the multipart ZIP file listed below.  An additional download has also been provided containing the source code for the session used in the video for those interested in exploring the code.

While this approach results in a larger number of individual files to download, it allows me to post the content and make it available at a location with no bandwidth limitations associated with it.

As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Download links for Session 01

Note that as with all of these screencasts, to successfully view them on your computer you will need to download and install the TechSmith Camtasia Codec.

  • Summer of NHibernate Session 01 Screencast Part 1 of 3
  • Summer of NHibernate Session 01 Screencast Part 2 of 3
  • Summer of NHibernate Session 01 Screencast Part 3 of 3
  • Summer of NHibernate Session 01 Code Sample

 Update: As mentioned here, all content has been moved to the Summer of NHibernate Web Site.