Six weeks ago, when I started my experiments with NHibernate's 3.2 new mapping feature - mapping-by-code, I was a loyal Fluent NHibernate user and a fan of method chains in APIs. My first impression about mapping-by-code was that it seems to be a good direction, but it's still immature and - what's important - not documented at all. I decided to have a deeper look and it turned into a tvelwe-part series exploring all the possible mappings - probably the only complete guide to mapping-by-code on the web so far. Time to sum the series up.
Let's start with what mapping-by-code is. It is an XML-less mapping solution being an integral part of NHibernate since 3.2, based on ConfORM library. Its API tries to conform to XML naming and structure. There's a strong convention in how the mapping methods are built. Its names are almost always equal to XML elements names. The first parameter points to the mapped property, second is for its options corresponding XML attributes (and XML <key> element, if applicable) and the rest of parameters, if any, corresponds to nested XML elements. It's very convenient for those familiar with XML schema or for documentation readers.
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