Perhaps I shouldn't be a developer, I seem to have much better future as a tester, I find so many bugs when I try to program.

My most recent experiment was with NHibernate. I'm not asking for much, all I want is a bug tracking database that I can put to use on my personal projects. Unfortantely, BugZilla and I didn't get along and I finally removed it.

I can't get Sql Server or MSDE to install on this computer, probably because I install/uninstalled so many times (including SQL Server Express betas) that now I get an install that seems to work, but leave me with a server (probably) but no way to access it (which is why I'm not sure that I've the server).

I couldn't find a bug tracking software that work with MySql/SqlLite/Access/Files that I would like. Meaning that it was free, easy to install (read: didn't require me to jump throught hops) and optionally offer smart client features (IE, windows application).

There are  all sorts  of  bug  tracking  software  that  I tested, but nearly all of them either require Ms Sql Server or were ports from linux that required me to install strange stuff on my computer just to test them. Considerring the amount of works that it takes, I wasn't willing to make the effort.

I'm reading a lot about O/R Mappers so I decided to try NHibernate due to the excellent review by Scott Bellware.

As I mentioned, I want a bug tracking software, so I decided to try a proof-of-concept bug tracking with NHibernate. I installed MySql and was very surprised by the quality of the tools (There is a reason why I insist on using only .Net tools when possible, the UI is usually better.) I wish that I'd something similar to use on Sql Server Express (and no, the Express Manaager doesn't come close.)

NHibernate is a port of Hibernate, so it's pretty mature design-wise (still learning it, can't comment on the quality of the code) but it has one big problem, and that is its documentation. I only now got it to work on my machine, and I've been trying for over a day to just pull a value from MySql Server and then print it to the screen. I'm happy to confirm that I finally managed it.

The second problem that NHibernate has is poor error reporting, the main problem was that I didn't reference MySql.Data.dll assembly, so it couldn't connect to MySql, but the error I got was "problem in find" with an inner exception complaining about NullArgumentException in Activator.CreateInstance().

Usually I'm very relucant to debug other people code, especially when it's such a big undertaking. You need to learn the code to debug it, and that usually take quite some time. But I was angry, it was at friday morning and it's raining outside, so I didn't care. Eventually I found out the problem, and right there in the comments it tells me that I need to reference MySql.Data.dll and then it silently fail if I don't.

This is a case where a single assertion would've saved a lot of trouble.

Anyway, it's working now, so I'm going to continue to experiment.

I'll post my results soon.