So the cool kids over on the Ruby / RoR camp have had their Gems package manager for ages now.  It’s a brilliant system of managing your project’s dependencies without having to xcopy files around the whole time and it’s one thing that the .NET side has lacked for a very long time. So here comes Nu, a package manager built on the Ruby & Gems platform that integrates with .NET assemblies.  Finally, no more wondering “did I remember to update my Castle dependency?” or “Which version of StructureMap was this built on again?” I see @ayende’s beaten me to blogging ab

So the UNIX text editor vi has been around since 1976 – that’s 14 years longer than I have.  Vim (vi improved) is still under huge active development today.  I’ve often ended up using vim when using a Linux machine, but I ended up treating it like notepad, sitting with –INSERT--  at the bottom left corner of the screen the whole time. All that time knew I was barely scratching at the 0.1% of vim’s capabilities, but it was a recent post by @robconery that got me thinking more about “how” I edit text.  A short while later while messing around on my Linux / Rail

Over the last while I’ve been playing a lot with a distributed version control system (DVCS) called Git.  In the last while, particularly with the presence of sites such as the excellent GitHub, Git has gained a lot of popularity and support among developers.  Before anyone accuses me of “jumping on the Git bandwagon” – the bandwagon’s got a lot of momentum, and there’s good reasoning for that. I’m not going to bore you with the detail of how Git and its distributed model works, there are plenty of excellent articles littering the web you can find with a quick search o

Continuing where we left off from part 1, we had created a class library called DomainModel and created four classes to act as data transfer objects. In this part we’ll create our first NHibernate mapping for the Product entity. Lets revisit what our Product class looks like first. We have three properties which we want to map to our columns in the database.  NHibernate does this using XML files. Quick tip: Make sure you’ve brought the nhibernate-configuration.xsd and nhibernate-mapping.xsd files into your solution.  They are in the NHibernate redistributable you would hav