Mr. Advice

Summary

Mr. Advice is an open source (and free of charge) alternative to PostSharp (which is still far more advanced, see https://www.postsharp.net).
It intends to inject aspects at build-time. Advices are written in the form of attributes, and marking methods with them makes the pointcut, resulting in a nice and easy aspect injection.
More information about what is an aspect at Wikipedia.

Mr. Advice can weave assemblies for:

• .NET framework (4 and above) / Mono
• Silverlight (4 & 5)
• Universal Windows Platform
• .NET Standard 2.0

Mr. Advice allows you to:

• Advise methods or parameters, at assembly, type, method or parameter level
• Advice types (at assembly startup)
• Introduce fields
• Advise Mr. Advice (and this is BIG) at weaving-time (during build step), so you can rename methods as they are advised, add properties, etc.

How it works

It is available as a package. There is also an automatic build with tests at appveyor. The current status is

Philosophy

Currently, MrAdvice won't bring you any aspect out-of-the-box. This means you'll have to write your own aspects (however you can see below other packages using Mr. Advice).
So it brings us to the next chapter, which is...

How to implement your own aspects

In a nutshell

Here is the minimal sample:

public class MyProudAdvice : Attribute, IMethodAdvice
{
    public void Advise(MethodAdviceContext context)
    {
        // do things you want here
        context.Proceed(); // this calls the original method
        // do other things here
    }
}

You then just need to mark the method(s) with the attribute and that's it, your aspect is injected!

[MyProudAdvice]
public void MyProudMethod()
{
}

More details

Your aspects can be injected at assembly, type or method level, simply by setting the attribute:

• When an aspect is injected at asembly level, all methods of all types are weaved.
• When the aspect is injected at type level, all of its methods are weaved.
• And of course, if the aspect is injected on a method, only the method is weaved.

Contributing

Currently, Mr. Advice still exists in two flavors:

• The brand new version using dnlib, in master branch. This is the branch you can contribute to, by forking and submitting pull requests.
• A legacy version using Fody and Cecil still exists in fody branch. This version still exists in NuGet, and is available under ID MrAdvice.Fody. However, it is not supported anymore and may disappear in the future.

Other projects using Mr. Advice

NuGet packages:

• MrAdvice.MVVM and its NuGet package, an MVVM implementation using aspects.
• Persistence and its NuGet package, a library that helps persisting properties in registry with a simple attribute.

Miscellaneous projects:

• The Blue Dwarf, a tunneling anti-censorship local proxy.

Contact and links

Project owner is picrap, feel free to drop a mail ✉️.
Project company is Arx One, a french company editor of backup software solutions.