For all those like me who decide to Google first, here is the answer.

A number of the *Part classes in the FluentNHibernate.Mapping namespace implement the IAccessStrategy(Of ComponentPart(Of T)) interface. This interface defines one property, Access which returns an AccessStrategyBuilder(Of T) object. The AccessStrategyBuilder object has a number of methods used to define the access strategy:

• AsCamelCaseField
• AsField
• AsLowerCaseField
• AsPascalCaseField
• AsProperty
• AsReadOnlyPropertyThroughCamelCaseField
• AsReadOnlyPropertyThroughLowerCaseField
• AsReadOnlyPropertyThroughPascalCaseField

This information I found relatively quickly. What I was missing was how to specify that my camel case fields are prefixed with the underscore character. But all of the CamelCase, LowerCase and PascalCase variations of the methods listed above have an overload which accepts an instance of a Prefix object, of which there are 4 variations:

• m
• mUnderscore
• None
• Underscore

So in the end, my mapping is as follows:

WithTable("client")

Id(Function(c) c.ID, "id").WithUnsavedValue(0).GeneratedBy.Identity()

Map(Function(c) c.AccountName).TheColumnNameIs("account_name")
Map(Function(c) c.Company).TheColumnNameIs("company")
Map(Function(c) c.Created).TheColumnNameIs("created")
Map(Function(c) c.Updated).TheColumnNameIs("updated")
Map(Function(c) c.UseAdministrativeContactAsBillingContact).TheColumnNameIs("blg_is_adm")

Component(Of Client)(Function(c) c.AdministrativeContact, _
                     AddressOf MapAdministrativeContact).Access.AsCamelCaseField(Prefix.Underscore)
Component(Of Client)(Function(c) c.BillingContact, _
                     AddressOf MapBillingContact).Access.AsCamelCaseField(Prefix.Underscore)

Pronounced “Sharp Architecture,” this is a solid architectural foundation for rapidly building maintainable web applications leveraging the ASP.NET MVC framework with NHibernate.

This evening I took about an hour and converted the basic starter solution template from C# to VB.Net. Why? Well, for the following reasons:

1. While I can work with C# well enough, I’m much more familiar with VB.Net, which I am required to use at my 9 to 5 job. I tend to stick with VB.Net even for my personal projects for simplicity. Anything I learn on my own I can easily apply at work.
2. It gave me an opportunity to confirm that I understand (at least at a high level) what the S#arp Architecture is doing.

The conversion was straight forward. Pretty well every line of C# had a corresponding line in VB.Net. The only thing I had to add was an Imports tag in the markup of the Site.Master page in order to get the ActionLink and Image extension methods to resolve. I had already tried adding an imports to the code-behind with no luck. Not sure why that was necessary, but it worked.

The architecture is pretty neat. Here’s a few things I’ve noted already:

• The Models, Views and Controllers (I.e. the M, V and C in MVC) are each in their own projects.
• The Repository/IRepository pattern is used, with the Interfaces defined in the same project as the Models, and the Repository implementation(s) in a separate project.
• Includes support for NUnit, Castle Windsor, (Fluent) NHibernate, and Rhino Mocks
• The ASP.Net MVC routes are defined in the Controllers project, not in the Global.asax of the Web/Views project. Excellent separation of concerns!

I’m going to go ahead and trying putting together an actual application based on S#arp Architecture.