Entity Developer now supports NHibernate!

[Devart]

Dear users,

We are glad to announce the Beta version of new beta of Entity Developer 4.0. This beta features a new edition - Entity Developer for NHibernate - a powerful visual NHibernate designer and code generation tool, which allows you to design NHibernate models using both Database-First and Model-First design approach or mixed approach and eliminate the need for manually creating NHibernate hbm mapping files.

Entity Developer allows generating NHibernate model from existing databases or creating a new model from scratch, and then creating a database, based on the model with automatic mapping of NHibernate types to the corresponding database data types. It provides flexible naming rules for generating class and property names from the names of the database tables and columns and vice versa. Model classes, properties, and relations are created, edited, and mapped in convenient visual designers, making the development process easier and faster.

With Entity developer you can design NHibernate models both in Visual Studio like any other Visual Studio documents and in the separate Entity Developer application.

Entity Developer has a powerful T4-template based code generation system which allows flexible customization of generated code. Entity Developer also provides support for attributes from available assemblies, which can be assigned to classes, properties or contexts of a model. Assigned attributes and the values of their parameters will be present in generated code. For example, the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotation attributes can be used for validation.

Entity Developer can generate both POCO entities and hbm.xml mapping. Code and hbm.xml mapping for the classes can be generated to a single file each or you can generate a separate code file and a separate mapping file for each entity class. It can be useful for large models. Code generation can be redirected to another project; this allows you to store the model in one Visual Studio project and generate its code to another one.

You are welcome to download and evaluate the new Beta here.

If you wish to provide feedback on the new version, you can do it in our forums or with contact form. There is also a feedback form, and we are always glad to hear your comments and take into account your development needs.