Metalama Status Update (November 2022)

[gfraiteur]

It has been another month of bug fixing and polishing in Metalama and I'm glad to announce that, at the time of writing, we have zero severe bug in our backlog! We also progressed with PostSharp migration assistance, .NET 7.0 / C# 11 support, LinqPad support, and we even integrate with CodeLens!

Zero severe bug

We have fixed 55 bugs in November and have reached an important milestone: zero severe bug. We define a severe bug as a bug that prevents you from editing or building your project without changing your business code (as opposed to the aspect code). Of course it does not mean that no customer experiences any bug any more, but this is a big step forward.

It is a good time to start playing with Metalama. Because the team is no longer busy fixing severe bugs, once a new one appears, we can address it in hours or days.

PostSharp migration

Last month, we published the PostSharp API Annotated for Migration to Metalama. This month, we are announcing Metalama.Extensions.Multicast, an open-source emulation of PostSharp attribute multicasting for Metalama. Our design objective with Metalama is that you should not have to change your business code when migrating from PostSharp to Metalama, that it should be enough to migrate your aspect code.

We are still not completely done with the PostSharp-to-Metalama migration story: there is no documentation, and we want to release a package to report warnings and errors for the PostSharp API.

Support for Roslyn 4.4, C# 11 and .NET 7.0

We have merged Roslyn 4.4 into Metalama Compiler and fixed the issues with .NET 7.0. The new features of C# 11 are still not fully implemented in Metalama: you may still hit some bug if you use them.

We also published PostSharp 6.11 RC this week, with support for C# 11 and .NET 7.0.

Code Lens for Visual Studio

We added a new experimental feature to Metalama Tools for Visual Studio: integration with Code Lens. The feature shows you how many aspects are applied to any declaration. When you click on the summary, you will get a detailed list of all transformations applied to the declaration. The feature will be developed further after the RTM release according to users' feedback.

LinqPad support

The Metalama driver for LinqPad has been fixed and greatly enhanced this month. The driver allows to query the code model of any .NET project, whether it uses Metalama or not. For Metalama-enabled projects, the driver lets you query the aspect model (aspects, advice, transformations, ...).

What's next

We are almost done for RC. There is still work with the documentation, the new C# 11 features, and with a few kinds of advice like overriding indexers or introducing generic interfaces.

We have also started the work to port the PostSharp ready-made aspects to Metalama. This is going to be a long-term project, but it's good to see that it's now in progress.

If you want to give Metalama a try, the best way to get quick feedback in real time is to join our Slack community. You can also submit bugs and feature requests from different channels. Your feedback is greatly appreciated as always.

Happy meta-programming with Metalama!