The Shrinking DLL Universe of NHibernate

There have been some interesting changes in the NHibernate universe recently. It used to be that you needed a whole bunch of DLLs and some extra config to do anything useful with NHibernate.

• NHibernate
• Iesi.Collections
• Antlr.Runtime
• Remotion.Data.Linq
• NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle
• Castle.Core

As of NHibernate 3.1, Antlr and Remotion have been ILMerged into the main dll, producing this picture.

• NHibernate
• Iesi.Collections
• NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle
• Castle.Core

As of NHibernate 3.2, there's now a default lazy proxy provider based on LinFu (thanks Philip). As well, this proxy provider is configured automatically, reducing a line of config required. This produces an even nicer picture for most users.

• NHibernate
• Iesi.Collections

Now we just need to replace Iesi.Collections with the .NET 4 ISet and we'll only have one dll to reference. I have no idea when that will happen, but it's an interesting thought anyways.

WPF Lazy Proxy Revisited for NHibernate 3.2

When hooking up to PropertyChanged events, some systems require that the same object that a handler was registered with be the same object that throws the event. With NHibernate proxying, this can be a problem. The external viewer normally hooks up to the proxy object, but then the actual implementation object is the one throwing the property changed event, using "this" as a reference, which is naturally different from the proxy. This behavior occurs because the proxying is not entirely transparent. Even though the user hooks up to the proxy object and expects events from the proxy object, the real object throws the events, messing with handlers that may be stored in dictionaries mapped by the sender. See my first post for other details on this same problem.

The original solution to this problem modified the Castle bytecode provider. Now, with NHibernate 3.2, there is a default provider built-in. Here is the new code with the fix for the PropertyChanged event. Using this code fixes problems with WPF and libraries like Obtics.