RIA Services and NHibernate Recipes - Introduction

For the last few weeks I've been working on a new system at work that implements a Silverlight MVVM UI on top of RIA Services. The back end is a SQL Server database that is accessed via NHibernate using LINQ4NHibernate and FluentNHibernate to configure everything.

There has been a fair amount of pain in the process, so prompted by a tweet from @SLColinBlair I've decided to start blogging a series of recipes for using RIA Services and NHibernate together.

As I go, I'm going to create a simple "Client / Project" management application to use throughout which will allow me to blog about each recipe within a common context.

The diagram to the right shows the data structures we'll be starting with.

• A Client has zero or more Contacts and Projects.
• A Contact belongs to just one client and has zero or more Responsibilities, each of which is to just one Project.

I will expand the scope of the sample application as we introduced more recipes - any requests will be most welcome on Twitter.

Next time: Getting started - The Clients object.