What's up with NHibernate and its book?

It has been a while since I have blogged about NHibernate and the book. Since then, many changes happened:

First, in case you didn't realized, NHibernate 1.2.1 has be out for quite a while. NHibernate has a new project leader: Karl Chu. He is very active in the development mailing list and he participates in the discussions that will eventually lead to NHibernate 2.0.

NHibernate is being reorganized to move away from its current monolithic structure. Most features of Hibernate 3.2 should be ported in NHibernate 2.0 (Thanks to the efforts of Fabio Maulo, Dario Quintana, Ayende Rahien, etc). There are also many on-going side-projects worth checking: NH.Shard, NH.Search, NH.Linq, NH.Validator, NH.Burrow. For more details, take a look at the new NH-Contrib project and their documentation for Hibernate.

I think that the release of NHibernate 2.0 will be a turning point in the way NHibernate is developed. It will start evolving on par with Hibernate.

About NHibernate in Action:
I was quite busy in 2007, and I barely managed to complete all the chapters for the final review few months ago. After that, Tobin Harris was asked to complete the work. He is now a co-author of the book.

It took him some time to get comfortable writing the book but the result should be even better than the state in which I left the chapters. For those who subscribed to the MEAP, please, be patient, Manning wants a high quality book and it takes a lot of time to part-time (and first-time) authors to write it :)

NHibernate in Action is going to production next week, which means no more changes and no more delays. The last bit that I am still concerned about is the source code. Currently, it is pretty much done but it needs to be polished and organized.

In the last couple of months, I have been playing with Silverlight and .NET 3.5; it will be the topic of my next blog entry :)