I am pleased to announce the general availability of PostSharp 1.5 RTM, available for download today. This is an important milestone, meaning that PostSharp 1.5 is now stable and ready for production. The release candidate cycle has been pretty tranquil, with only two bugs reported in the previous build. The number of downloads of PostSharp 1.5 has actually exceeded the one of PostSharp 1.0 for three months.

Following our policy to maintain a single stable branch of the product, PostSharp 1.0 is now considered obsolete and unsupported (bugs will be corrected only on a commercial basis). PostSharp 1.0 is less robust than PostSharp 1.5 in many respects, so nobody should regret the transition. We publish today PostSharp 1.0 SP2, the last release of this version.

PostSharp 1.5 will continue to be maintained for both commercial customers and the community, but no new feature will be added.

Most of our efforts during last 6 months have been directed to the next major version of PostSharp. The objective of PostSharp 2.0 is to be a robust and full-bodied platform for aspect oriented programming for .NET.

The new Visual Studio plug-in will help to visualize aspects in code. The new aspect framework, evolved from PostSharp Laos, will make it easier to develop more complex aspects like NotifyPropertyChanged. Its new aspect dependency checker will make PostSharp more suitable for large teams and projects. Smarter code generation will deliver better runtime performance. Thanks to the new architecture, third-party vendors (e.g. vendors of ORM or monitoring solutions) will be able to develop aspects that better integrate with user-defined ones. And, of course, recent platforms as .NET 4.0, Silverlight 3 or Microsoft CF 3.5 will be supported. An ambitious release...

I can't tell you more right now, but I hope I will be more prolix after the summer.

Happy PostSharping!

-gael