It’s been six weeks since Dynamic Proxy 2.1 was released. During that time DP itself was downloaded over 1000 times (plus almost 3500 times as part of Windsor) which I think is a very nice result. Although some people considered Castle Project dead, because of a long pause between RC3 and the recent release its user base is still strong.
To assure you that you won’t have to wait another 18 months for the next release here’s a quick report from the front, on what is happening with the project as it’s heading for its 2.2 release.
We moved out Continuous Integration from CruiseControl.NET to TeamCity. This not only gives us nicer administration GUI and less headaches with configuration but also added few important capabilities (more on this in a moment). We also are extending our tool set with NCover and NDepend to improve insight into the project quality and improve the quality itself.
Patrick McEvoy is hosting a build agent on his Linux box, so that we now can do Mono builds on Linux as part of our CI process. This is not yet working 100% but guys are working hard, to make sure Castle has best possible compatibility with Mono.
We also added a Silverlight builds. Although Dynamic Proxy (and other projects as well) rely on capabilities that are not present in Silverlight, we’re doing our best to expose as much good things as possible to the Silverlight users.
Other than that we’re also fixing bugs that surfaced after the v2.1 release, and we’re improving support for mixins, but I’ll have a dedicated post for that.
So to sum it up: our minor v2.2 release will bring official support for Mono, Silverlight, bugfixes, and change in how mixins are handled (rest assured – this should not break any existing code). I can’t give you release date yet, other than “soon”.
We also started gathering ideas and designing next major version: Castle Dynamic Proxy 3. You can get rough idea of what we’re planning on our wiki. Since it’s a wiki, feel free to edit it, add your comments and insights. We’re also collecting ideas – use our feedback site for that. Add your suggestions and ideas, vote on the ones you like. The higher vote number the more likely we will add the feature. For now nothing is yet decided and we want as much feedback and ideas as possible, so please keep it coming. What are your pain points with the library? What scenarios would you like it to enable? This is the time to share that with us.
And remember that it’s an open source project, so you can also share your code, documentation and help in various other ways.