NH Designer Free

I have been trying to evaluate NH Designer, but I'm running into several issues.

First, I wonder, is the free edition being updated? I see the blog talking about improvements, but I downloaded and tried to reinstall it, and it says it's already up to date.

I'll be frank: I did not have a good experience the first time I tried this tool - about 10 minutes in, it crashed Visual Studio, and then wouldn't open at all - so I gave up quite quickly and decided to try a competing tool.

As it turns out, more than 100 hours into using the competing tool, this may not have been a good decision, but that's another story. I was using VS2010 without any updates, so it could be that VS itself was not up to par - I've installed the latest VS2010 updates, and I'd like to give your tool another shot.

Your page talks about SQL Server 2008 support, but the best option in the "Database Provider" drop-down is SQL Server 2005. (another thing that makes me wonder if the free edition is being updated...)

Is there a trial version of the full product?

A few other questions:

1. There is no way to add documentation to properties in the model?

2. There is no way to control modifiers (public/private/etc.) on get/set-accessor methods individually?

3. There is no support for many-to-one mappings on components? (basic example: Customer has two Address components, say, Billing and Shipping - each component instance references a Country object.)

4. There is no way to add custom attributes (other than the built-in validation attributes) to generated properties?

5. When defining inheritance, it appears there is no way to specify a discriminator-value for the base class? Only options are "Null" and "NotNull" - what happens in a generalization/specialization scenario, e.g. when the base-class is concrete, and you plan on actually saving instances of the base-class?

6. No support for enumerator properties? (no support for custom property-types as such?)

How does LightSpeed compare in terms of the issues mentioned above? Would I be better off switching to LightSpeed? (I am not working with a legacy database, and this software has not been released yet, so how things are persisted is less important than the architecture of the object-model itself.)

I used your contact form about a month ago, and never received a reply. I have some non-technical questions that I would rather not post in public.

We're sorry you had a bad experience with the designer. We're not sure what could have caused the crash but if you see it again (and you're willing to help us diagnose it) then let us know and we'll talk you through capturing a log file.

Yes, it is being maintained and there have been several rounds of enhancements and fixes since the first release of 2.0. However, these tend to be customer driven and we've not had many requests recently (I'll chase up what happened to your contact form) so there hasn't been an update since before the Christmas/New Year break.

Regarding SQL Server 2008, the SQL Server 2005 provider supports both SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 (including spatial data types).

Regarding your other questions:

1. Right click an entity or property and choose Documentation to display the Documentation window. This works in a similar way to the Properties window -- it tracks your selection and displays the documentation options appropriate to the current selection. (We did it as a separate window because we thought entering potentially lengthy docs into those tiny little boxes would be a bit of a pain!)

2. No, but we can add options for particular combinations. For example, we have an option for 'public get, protected set'; if you need 'public get, private set' or 'public get, internal set' etc. then let us know. (The reason we don't have separate options is that most of the time people want the same visibility for the getter and setter, so making them specify it twice would be a pain.)

3. To have two Address components on a Customer entity, drag two ValueObjectProperty connectors from Customer to Address and name them appropriately (e.g. Billing and Shipping). You will also need to set up the column mappings for each one (click on the connector and configure the "Column Name for ..." setting in the Properties grid).

4. We don't have custom attributes on generated properties at the moment but we would be happy to add this for you.

5. At the moment, we only support the null/not-null base class discriminator approach, but we can definitely look at adding support for 'real' discriminator values.

6. I'm afraid I'm not sure I've understood this one. We support user-defined types: you can define these through the NHibernate Model Explorer (View > Other Windows > NHibernate Model, right-click the root node, choose Add New User Mapped Type or Add New Enum Type; you can then use the defined type in the Data Type drop-down for an entity property). Is this what you mean by custom property types or are you thinking of something different?

Regarding comparison to LightSpeed: (1) same; (2) supported in core but not in designer, but we'd be happy to add designer support; (3) same; (4) supported; (5) base class discriminator is always the default for the discriminator type (e.g. 0), plus all unmapped values map to the base class; (6) similar if I've understood the question (LightSpeed has support for custom mappings and user-defined types). Would you be better off switching to LightSpeed? Well, we're biased, but we do believe that most developers will be more productive with LightSpeed than with NHibernate -- we feel it is simpler, and the designer has a lot of productivity features not all of which are available in the NHibernate designer. Of course if you are already familiar with NHibernate then you may feel that you are going to be more productive going with something you know rather than trying something new -- we're not going to try to push LightSpeed on you, just to answer your question about choosing between them!

You can see more discussion about this at http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/lightspeed/comparing-lightspeed (you might also be interested in http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/lightspeed/lightspeed-designer and http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/lightspeed/documentation -- but let me stress that if you decide to stick with NHibernate then we will still be happy to make the NH designer enhancements for you and that we will welcome any further feedback or feature requests!

Thank you for the quick reply!

1. I thought the Documentation option would open up the documentation for the application! ha ha :-)

2. Another way to achieve the current ease of use with two options, would be to have the second option default to "Same as getter" - that way, you're setting both getter and setter visibility from one drop-down, but still have the freedom to use any visibility combination supported by the language.

3. Creating and connecting the value objects was not the problem - adding a reference to a Country from the Address component does not seem to be supported? You are allowed to put a <many-to-one> inside a <component> tag in NH mappings.

4/5/6 answered my other questions, and you answered my questions about LightSpeed too, thank you.

Is there any way to import an existing project? I already have mapping-files and (generated) code with documentation. If I decided to move to NH Designer, would I have to rebuild the existing model from scratch?