To start working on NHibernate, we will need Visual Studio and the NHibernate package.

Visual Studio Installation

Microsoft provides a free version of Visual Studio, which also contains SQL Server and it can be downloaded from https://www.visualstudio.com Following are the steps for the installation.

Step 1 − Once the downloading is completed then run the installer, then the following dialog box will be displayed.

Step 2 − Click on the Install button and it will start installation process.

Step 3 − Once the installation process is completed successfully, you will see the following dialog box.

Step 4 − Close this dialog box and restart your computer if required.

Step 5 − Now open Visual studio from the Start Menu which will open the following dialog. It will take some time for the first time for preparation.

Step 6 − Once all this is done, you will see the main window of Visual Studio.

NHibernate Package Installation

NHibernate is a mature, open source object-relational mapper for the .NET framework. It is actively developed, fully featured and used in thousands of successful projects. You can install NHibernate package with the following methods.

Direct Download

• Download the zip from file from https://sourceforge.net/ which contains all the binaries that are required.

• Extract this zip file and include all these binaries in your project.

Install Using NuGet

• Another way of installing NHibernate is to use NuGet to install the NHibernate package, which is by far the easiest way to incorporate NHibernate into a project.

• It”s going to download all the NHibernate dependencies and create references to all of the required assemblies.

• To install NHibernate, run the following command in the Package Manager Console.

install-package NHibernate

You are now ready to start your application.