We’re happy to announce that the first preview of PostSharp 5.1 is now ready for download on NuGet Gallery (make sure to enable the “include pre-release” option) and on our website.
PostSharp 5.1 will focus on providing support for .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET Core 2.0. Our objective is to port the PostSharp compiler itself to .NET Standard 2.0 so that we can compile .NET Standard and .NET Core applications natively, without cross-compilation. PostSharp 5.1 will still only support Windows as the only build platform.
PostSharp 5.1 comes after months of increasing instability of PostSharp 5.0. Initially, we tried to implement support for .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET Core 2.0 as bug fixes on the top of PostSharp 5.0, but it proved impossible to do without a significant refactoring of our type binding logic. We decided that, in respect to our .NET Framework users, we could not afford to destabilize PostSharp 5.0 any more, and therefore that any effort to support .NET Standard and .NET Core would go into a new version.
For the same reason, we will no longer solve bugs in .NET Standard 1.* and .NET Core 1.* in our PostSharp 5.0, but only in PostSharp 5.1.
PostSharp 5.0 was significantly destabilized by the release of .NET 4.7.1 and VS 15.5. We did not anticipate the breaking changes, as Microsoft seemed to be more careful with that in the past. At this moment, we realized we passed the breaking point of our type binding component and needed a complete refactoring to isolate us from what Microsoft may deem as implementation details.
We understand that several customers are not allowed to use pre-RTM releases of a product and our decision may push them in a difficult situation. We sincerely apologize. We’re going to push hard to move PostSharp 5.1 to RTM quality as soon as possible. Currently, we consider PostSharp 5.1 to be more stable than PostSharp 5.0, but it lacks testing in the field and customer feedback.
Happy PostSharping!
-gael