When you are learning about a vast software library like NHibernate, it is very easy to get lost reading the pages of the manual. Using a library to build an application end to end is a lot more engaging and offers a different level of learning experience. Although the problem statement that I have presented in this chapter does not sound very modern, it does give us an opportunity to learn some important NHibernate features. It is important that you spend some time distilling the problem in your head.

A developer's true friend at work is his/her development environment, the tools that he/she uses, and the methodologies that he/she follows. While agile has become commonplace, I understand that TDD is not. We are going to use both to some extent in this book. However, as I said earlier, I will keep the TDD aspect to a level required to finish the job at hand. Our focus is to build the data access layer using NHibernate.

We looked at what NHibernate is capable of already and I hope that...