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.