Hello readers. I'm just wrapping up here at CodeMash 2014, so it seems like a good time to evaluate... stuff.

First, let's talk about 2013, because I did a lot of stuff:

• Presented a session at CodeMash 2013
• Got a book published: AOP in .NET
• Taught two semesters of Web Development at Capital University
• Helped to organize and run the last CODODN conference (it will be relaunhced as the Midwest Tech Fest)
• Toured all over the place at conferences and user groups, talking about refactoring and AOP
• Doing some live webinars for PostSharp
• Helped run a few small things for CodeMash 2014
• My full-time job at Zimbra (formerly Telligent), and helped to release Analytics 4.0
• I was awarded a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award

So, here's some 2014 stuff:

• I think I will be travelling and speaking less (i.e. I won't be submitting much, but I certainly remain open to invitations)
• I plan to write/screencast more
• I plan to write and share a lot more code, especially mobile apps
• I will still be helping to organize and run the Midwest Tech Fest

As part of this initiative, this blog will be changing from being focused mainly on AOP to having a more general focus. This does not mean AOP is going away! I'm still very much interested in AOP. I am just expanding the concerns across which I am cutting.

Also, I think I may try to change this site over to some sort of Bootstrap layout/theme.

I will be under the surgeon's knife on Tuesday, so there probably won't be any posts this week. Hopefully, I will be able to resume posting at least once or twice next week, and get back to normal posting frequency within 2 weeks. Thanks for being a loyal reader of CrossCuttingConcerns!

If you have any short notes, blogs, or full articles that you'd like me to post here, please contact me; I'd be happy to post them!

PostSharp 2.1 SP 1 is now released. This is pretty much a maintenance release, addressing bugs.

There are some new features, including integration with decompiler tools (dotPeek, ILSpy, and Reflector are supported).

What's intriguing is the new features for and allusions to the PostSharp Toolkit, which could be a very interesting release from SharpCrafters.

Anyway, PostSharp is perhaps the most popular and stable tool for AOP in .NET. I'm not saying it's the end-all-be-all, but if you are interested in AOP for .NET, PostSharp is where I think you should start. You can download 2.1 SP1 (aka 2.1.6.4) at SharpCrafters.com, or just do it the easy way and get it via NuGet.

Thank you for visiting, and welcome to Cross Cutting Concerns.

I've been evangelizing AOP (and PostSharp) for a while now, so I thought it would make sense to create a focused blog around this topic instead of using my much broader mgroves.com blog, as well as give me some additional motiviation to increase the frequency of my blogging this year.

So, what can you expect to see on this site?  Well, a lot about AOP theory and tools, for sure.  But ultimately, the goal of AOP is to improve your code, help you follow SOLID principles, save you time, make your app easier to maintain, and generally make life easier for object-oriented programmers; part of learning about AOP means learning when not to use AOP.  While I mainly write C# and use PostSharp, this blog's charter is not limited to either of them.  I may, from time to time, dive into AOP for Java, PHP, Ruby, etc, as well as look at other .NET AOP tools like DynamicProxy, LinFu, etc.

Also, I'm the sole author for now, but if you are interested in writing guest posts or becoming a regular author here, I will certainly be interested in talking to you about that.

One more minor note about this site: this site is not running on a blog engine like Orchard or BlogEngine.net.  I tried a couple and ultimately found that I've been pretty spoiled on Wordpress and its impressive extensibility and customization options.  However, I've never written a blog site on .NET, so I made that one of my requirements. So I ended up writing my own blog engine.  Yes, I can hear you groaning and rolling your eyes.  If you see bugs or weirdness, this is probably why, so please feel free to call me out on it so I can fix it.  I also plan to open source it eventually (as if the world needs another blog engine).