# Welcome to NHibernate

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.

The NHibernate community website - http://www.nhforge.org - has a range of resources to help you get started, including wikis, blogs and reference documentation.

## Latest Version

The quickest way to get the latest release of NHibernate is to add it to your project using NuGet (http://nuget.org/List/Packages/NHibernate).

Alternatively binaries are available from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate.

You are encouraged to review the release notes (releasenotes.txt), particularly when upgrading to a later version. The release notes will generally document any breaking changes.

## Community Forums

There are two official NHibernate community forums:

- NHibernate Users - a forum for users to find help using NHibernate
- NHibernate Development - a forum for the developers of NHibernate

## Bug Reports

If you find any bugs, please report them using the JIRA bug tracker. A test-case that demonstrates the issue is usually required. Instructions on providing a test-case can be found here.

## Licenses

This software is distributed under the terms of the Free Software Foundation Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL), version 2.1 (see lgpl.txt).

## Credits

Many thanks to the following individuals, organisations and projects whose work is so important to the success of NHibernate (in no particular order):

- NUnit - unit-testing
- Nant - build automation
- CodeBetter - TeamCity continuous integration and build management server hosting
- GitHub and SourceForge - source code hosting
- Atlassian - JIRA bug tracker licence and hosting
- Log4net - logging, by the Apache Software Foundation
- JetBrains - ReSharper licences for NHibernate developers
- LinFu - proxy implementation (Philip Laureano)
- Iesi.Collections - source code taken from an article written by Jason Smith
- Relinq - Linq provider for NHibernate