As you understood from my previous posts, PostSharp 2.0 is no disguised minor upgrade. PostSharp 2.0 brings major innovations not only to the .NET community, but also to the aspect-oriented programming (AOP) community in general.
The design objective of PostSharp 2.0 is to provide a powerful, robust and supportable platform for build-time aspect-oriented programming for the next 5 years, with high focus on extensibility and well-definedness; PostSharp 2.0 is explicitely designed to support multiple vendors of aspects so that ISVs can confidently distribute aspects to their customers.
The principal new features of PostSharp 2.0 are the following:
- Brand new aspect framework with support for advices (formerly named handlers), putting PostSharp on the level of leading aspect frameworks in other programming communities.
- Amazing Runtime Performance Enhancements thanks to Adaptive Code Generation: you don't pay any more for features you don't use.
- A Robust Aspect Dependencies Framework ensuring that multiple aspects behave in a predictive and consistent way when applied on the same code element.
- A Visual Studio Add-In enhancing developers' productivity by answering graphically to two questions: to which code elements is my aspect applied, and which aspects are applied to my code element.
- Improved Packaging and Start-Up Process acheiving higher performance, better reliability of the assembly search algorithm, and better supportability through extensive logging and support for Gibraltar (you can download their evaluation version if you want to have the same support experience than we have when you'll send us support details -- just start Gibraltar Analyst).
That was for the hype.
Now, frankly. Put your expectations inline with this fact that it is the first CTP. The objective of an early CTP is to deliver all risky features and see if it works. Sure, we have hundreds of unit tests, and it works for us. But there is a huge varierty of deployment conditions and source code structure in the field, and it's something we'll never be able to fully reproduce in a lab.
What's Not There?
This is maybe as important as what's there. The following features are not in the first preview but they will be there in a future preview.
- Conceptual documentation has not been updated. Class reference has been. Please refer to the blog (links given above) for introduction.
- PostSharp SDK (PostSharp Core) is not a part of the release and is not documented. Please do not use PostSharp Sdk with this CTP since next previews will probably break your code.
- .NET 4.0 is not yet supported. Sorry for that. I know many of you are looking forward for it. It'll be in next preview.
- Support for Compact Framework and Silverlight is not shipped with this release. It will be enabled back in a future preview, and newer versions of the platform will be supported.
When Will It Be Commercially Available?
Not before december; probably later.
Lenka, Jirka and others are working hard to deliver a brand new website. Attorneys are at work to deliver license texts. And PostSharp 2.0 is far from a release candidate anyway.
So please be patient and contact me for any commercial question.
So What's Now?
Remember what I wrote when I gave the first indications about PostSharp 2.0:
You know how communication is like: people will blog about it, say it's great (it is), and so on. I will do the same because I need to sell. But don't forget we are first engineers and not marketers. I want you to break the product. Find flaws. Find the weak element. Where will the design break, when it will break? Compare the features to your cases. Is there a case we could solve with a small design modification? We will maybe not solve your use case in this release, but make sure the design allows us to address the case in a future release. Nobody else than you, knowledgeable of your particular business, can provide this feedback.
So download PostSharp 2.0 CTP1 and put it on the test bench. Discuss issues on the forum and report bugs. You did a great job with PostSharp 1.0. Together, we'll PostSharp 2.0 still better!
Happy PostSharping!
-gael