Laos to a new design cycle?

by Gael Fraiteur on 09 Jan 2007

We had two important discussions today with Andre, one about PostSharp Laos, the other about the 'freeze' dates.

The discussion about PostSharp Laos, together with other doubts I have, suggests me to send PostSharp Laos in a new design cycle. I really need more feedback like the one of Andre today. I need to know what are the problems encountered in situation. These discussions may have on the design of PostSharp Laos, at least on the public interface.

My initial plan was to freeze all public interfaces with the Beta 1 release (which has been delayed because Wang saw an integration problem with VB.NET). But it seems that some parts of the code are more mature than others, and PostSharp Laos seems to belong to the second group.

So that's what I decided:

  1. The public interface of all core components (excluding eventually Laos and the MSBuild integration) will be frozen after the Beta 1 release. So people that started to use these interfaces (I know there are) can sleep on both ears.
  2. The specifications of PostSharp Laos will be frozen with Beta 2.
Remember that I really need your feedback to close the specs. The quality of the design depends also on your feedback!!

BTW, I plan to open the public interface of the weaver of PostSharp Laos, so it will be possible to implement new base custom attributes using the low-level APIes and using the infrastructure of Laos. This will be after Beta 1, however. I am still hesitating about the right moment to introduced the planned but missing features of PostSharp, principally:

  • the state sharing and

  • the possibility to add aspects programatically at compile-time (and not only declaratively using custom attributes), of course using solely System.Reflection and PostSharp.Laos (no low-level API).

Good night to all people living in my time zone,

Gael