Well, I finally got a bit of spare time and published the NHibernate driver and dialect for VistaDB as a CodePlex project.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, VistaDB is really useful even if you only use it during unit testing.

The really great thing about it though is that you can do normal database / NHibernate development and have a simple XCopy deployment which makes application demos very easy (complicated installs and configurations are often a barrier to evaluation and possible sales). Depending on your application and the usage that it gets VistaDB may or may not be up to the task of handling the persistence for the full deployment (it is a file-based database although a proper server version is on the way). With NHibernate though this isn't a worry as the customer is free to use any of the other supported database engines for the deployed version.

I intend to update a forum application I wrote a number of years ago to the new ASP.NET MVC about to be release and use the VistaDB database during development. The current SQL Server database is fairly large (about 4Gb) and has well over 2.5 million posts on it so it should give it a good test - I will let you know how I get on with it.