The enthusiastic and dedicated Alec Whittington took over as lead developer of S#arp Architecture earlier this year.  Since then, he's worked hard to maintain a clear direction, to further improve S#arp Architecture while adhering to its original principles, and to include additional great talent in the core development team including the guys behind the Who Can Help Me project sample (Howard van Rooijen, James Broome, and Jon George).  Through a lot of hard work, the team has released S#arp Architecture 1.6.  Alec's announcement:

It has been a while since the last release and we have had some nice features added. The biggest items in this release are:

• Fluent NHibernate 1.1 - We are now using version 1.1.0.635. The AutoMappingPersistenceGenerator has been updated to use the new bits as well.
• NHibernate Configuration caching has now been added
• CRUD forms now enable client side validation

This release was almost 100% done by the community, that is amazing! I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this release. I truly appreciate your help and feel that it benefits the community greatly.

Whats Next?

This will be the last version to support VS 2008 as well as .NET 3.5. We will keep a branch available for the community to maintain, but no further development will be done against this branch. The next version will be tagged 2.0, support only VS 2010 and .NET 4.0.

As you may have heard, we are in the process of a partial rewrite. We are working on increasing the code coverage as well as some new bits. While I will not go into details, lets just say one of our focuses is to make sure the installation and solution creation become easier and less problematic. We are also going with a more Who Can Help Me solution structure for not only the S#arp Architecture project, but also the default template. We all felt that this structure further reinforced the overall project goal of good design practices. We are also going to try and deliver better documentation as well as an expanded line of samples. On that note, the Who Can Help Me application as joined the Northwind sample as an official sample. There are many many other things as well, but they are still in the early stages, so we will leave them there for now. Once they get better defined, we will let everyone know.

I needn't state how pleased I am to see S#arp Architecture not just surviving, but thriving.  I have immense appreciation to Alec, the core team, and the S#arp community for the continued support and progress of this project.

If you're new to S#arp Architecture, I invite you to learn more at http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net/.

Billy McCafferty