title: Best practices for querying with NHibernate
body: <p>I've come back to using NHibernate after using other technologies (<a href="http://www.lhotka.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CSLA</a> and <a href="http://subsonicproject.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Subsonic</a>) for a couple of years, and I'm finding the querying a bit frustrating, especially when compared to Subsonic. I was wondering what other approaches people are using?</p>
  
  <p>The Hibernate Query Language doesn't feel right to me, seems too much like writing SQL, which to my mind is one of the reason to use an ORM tools so I don't have to, furthermore it's all in XML, which means it's poor for refactoring, and errors will only be discovered at runtime?</p>
  
  <p>Criteria Queries, don't seem fluid enough.</p>
  
  <p>I've <a href="http://jhollingworth.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/subsonic-like-nhibernate-query-generator-button-in-visual-studio/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">read</a> that Ayende's  <a href="http://www.ayende.com/projects/downloads/nhibernate-query-generator.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NHibernate Query Generator</a>, is a useful tool, is this what people are using? What else is out there?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: Worth a read
  <a href="http://www.ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/03/17/Implementing-Linq-for-NHibernate-A-How-To-Guide--Part.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/03/17/Implementing-Linq-for-NHibernate-A-How-To-Guide--Part.aspx</a></p>