Appendix B. Going forward
You’ve reached the end of this book. What remains is for us to give you some guidance and advice that will help you get started and master NHibernate. In this appendix, we enumerate the requirements to use NHibernate. Then, we give you a roadmap to progressively master NHibernate and keep yourself up to date. Finally, we encourage you to discover the internals of NHibernate and to contribute to and help improve NHibernate.
This book assumes that you have some experience with .NET programming. Before you begin to use NHibernate, you should already have the .NET framework and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Visual Studio or SharpDevelop. Note that you can also use Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/), which runs on other operating systems like Linux.
The NHibernate binaries, source code, and documentation are available on the NHibernate SourceForge website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate/. (SourceForge.net is a website that provides free hosting for open source software (OSS) development projects.)
Before NHibernate 1.2, two packages were available: nhibernate, containing the core binaries with source code and documentation; and NHibernateContrib, containing optional useful add-ons for NHibernate. Now, the packages have been merged. You’ll need NHibernate 1.2 or later to take advantage of .NET 2.0 generics and nullables.