Today I'm packing for one week of vacation followed by the AOSD 2008 conference, the principal conference of the AOP community

I will be presented PostSharp in a session academically named User-friendly aspects and compile-time imperative semantics in .NET with PostSharp and you can already download the paper in PDF format.

But that's not all. If you are to attend the conference, you are invited to the Microsoft.Community.Dinner that will take place the 2nd of April (the day of my speech) after the reception. Info and reservation at gael at fraiteur dot net.

During the

I am happy to announce that I started this week a long-term partnership with Starcounter AB, a Stockholm-based software shop producing a next-generation object database management system (ODBMS) that will make you understand the benefits of 64-bit hardware. I am not allowed to give too much details, but I'll sure do it once it will go public. Believe me, it sounds cool!

The good thing for PostSharp is that the partnership plans to reserve 40% of regular working time to PostSharp development. To be more precise, I will work in the average 3 days a week for Starcounter, but at a rate that allows me to invest the rest of the time in PostSharp.

Starcounter is already a old partner of PostSharp. Contacts started in June 2006, when they started considering PostSharp in their product. In November 2006, they sponsored the development of the hosting infrastructure, which allows to host PostSharp easily in server environments. In May-July 2007, they hired me to implement PostSharp in their product. The money allowed me to pack and publish the first release candidate, which was a really great step!

PostSharp just took too more time to be done in spare time (do you realize the time it takes to support users, correct bugs, and promote the project?). I am happy that our agreement will guarantee the future of PostSharp.

A great new for the community expecting long-term project viability!

Happy PostSharping!

Gael

If you belong to those who don't like global installations, the latest release candidate should make you happy: there is now a binary distribution without installer.

This distribution should remove much of the mystery about how PostSharp integrates in the build process. Actually, since the installer does not modify the MSBuild target files for you, you have to do it yourself. The interesting thing is that you can do it in a per-project basis: instead of modifying global MSBuild target files, you can just import PostSharp in the projects that actually need it.

If you think this kind of installation is for you, download the 'Binary - No Installer' package, and read carefully the installation instructions in the file doc/Build-Instructions.html.

Since this kind of distribution is quite new, I am looking forward for your comments.

Happy PostSharping!

Gael