Getting Started with NHibernate 3 and SQL Compact

There are many posts on the web about how easy it is to get started with Microsoft’s Entity Framework and SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE). This combination seems to be all the rage thanks to EF’s new “Code First” approach introduced in version 4.1. While I am impressed with the latest version of Entity Framework, I still prefer NHibernate for a lot of reasons, and it’s actually just as easy (maybe even easier) to get up and running with NHibernate+SQL CE as Entity Framework+SQL CE. In this post, I’ll walk you through the simple steps to get up and running.