Ayende Rahien’s blog has had the highest signal to noise ratio of any blog which I can think of in recent history. He has posted a series over the past three days on using Castle’s Active Record, including using his own NHibernate.Generics.dll assembly to use .NET 2.0 Generics instead of ISet, IBag, etc with NHibernate. As someone new to NHibernate and ActiveRecord his series of posts arrived at the perfect time.
His posts really sum up to an excellent article. They are of excellent quality. They start with a teaser post that points the reader on where to get some great Castle information. Then he preps you with telling you what he plans to do the next few days. Finally he gets to the first post with all the meat and he does not disappoint. He continues with the aforementioned NHibernate.Generics and Iesi.Collections post. Those posts alone should be enough to get a programmer new to ActiveRecord going. Then he give a where clause example. I’m thinking that along the way he found some room for improvement in his NHibernate.Generics library, because his next blog post is out of the series. He posts an update to his library! I read these in Bloglines and even I noticed that he was making lots of posts. He noticed it himself.
Two more super meaty posts! He even covers lazy loading here! Of course most relational databases have many to many relations and he covers that so finally we programs have all the tools we need to get started.
I recommend you subscribe to his feed, or grab his entire February page and print it. It will be like a fun book. A fun tech book of ActiveRecord with some intermediate SQL sprinkled in for good measure. Between all those Castle Demo App posts he finds time to write about some interesting SQL experiences.
Thanks for the weekend of hard work Ayende. Some of us are watching with great anticipation.