What's New in PostSharp 4.2

With PostSharp 4.2, we had two major objectives. The first was to dogfood our Threading Models into PostSharp Tools for Visual Studio, which pushed us to add many improvements both to the threading aspects and to the underlying aspect framework. The second focus was to expose code saving metrics, so you know how many lines of code you likely saved thanks to PostSharp. Additionally, we kept up with Microsoft and implemented support for the Elvis operator in NotifyPropertyChanged, and added experimental support for ASP.NET v5.

Improvements to Aggregatable Pattern

We added the following improvements to the Aggregatable pattern and to other patterns that depend on it:

• New advisable class AdvisableHashSet<T> in replacement of HashSet<T>.

• New methods to the AdvisableCollection<T> class: AddRange(IEnumerable<T>), InsertRange(int, IEnumerable<T>), RemoveRange(int, int).

• Support for immutable collections like ImmutableArray or ImmutableDictionary.

• Support for type adapters to allow third-party classes (at least read-only ones) to work with the Aggregatable pattern. See TypeAdapter for details.

• Ability to programmatically and automatically mark a field as child or reference without having to use a custom attribute in source code. See FieldRule for details.

• Performance improvement: memory no longer needs to be allocated at run time after objects are constructed, resulting in lower load on garbage collection.

• New extensions methods for advisable collections. See Extensions.

Improvements to NotifyPropertyChanged

Improvements include to NotifyPropertyChangedAttribute include:

• Support for the Elvis operator (?.) and properties of local variables.

• Notification of the PropertyChanging event. See Implementing INotifyPropertyChanging for details.

• Better error messages.

• Inclusion of property dependencies in Visual Studio tooltips.

• Performance improvement: memory no longer needs to be allocated at run time after objects are constructed, resulting in lower load on garbage collection.

Improvements to Threading Models

Improvements to threading models include:

• Performance improvement: memory no longer needs to be allocated at run time after objects are constructed, resulting in lower load on garbage collection.

• Several performance improvements regarding the instantiation of large object graphs. See Run-Time Performance of Threading Model for details.

• New ThreadSafetyPolicy attribute to emit warning when a class is not assigned to any threading model or when a static field is not of a thread-safe type. See Making a Whole Project or Solution Thread Safe for details.

• Better support for async methods: for lock-based models, locks are being awaited asynchronously instead of synchronously. These new high-performance advices are not yet fully implemented and tested for general use, therefore they are unsupported (except when they are used with our ready-made patterns) and undocumented.

• Complete dogfooding in our PostSharp Tools for Visual Studio, resulting in dozen of bug fixes and usability improvements.

• In the actor model, methods with non-void return type are now allowed and their execution will be done in the actor context, but the calling thread will wait synchronously for the execution to complete. Void but non-async methods must now be annotated with [Dispatched] (and until the next major version) to specify if execution must be synchronous or asynchronous.

Improvements to the Aspect Framework

Improvements to the aspect framework include:

• New advice OnAspectsInitializedAdvice invoked after all aspects on the current objects have been initialized.

• Ability to customize the description of aspects and advices in Visual Studio tooltips. See Customizing Aspect Description in CodeLens And Tooltips for details.

• In the OnMethodBoundaryAspect and related aspects, ability to yield (await) a state machine upon on entry and resume.

Improved Support for Visual Basic

Visual Basic is now supported and tested at the same level as C# both in PostSharp Compiler and PostSharp Tools for Visual Studio.

Code Saving Metrics

PostSharp will now estimate the number of handwritten lines of code and the number of lines of code that you likely saved using PostSharp. For details, see Estimating Code Savings.

Module Initializers

You can now define methods that get executed immediately after the assembly is loaded, before any other code is executed. See Executing Code Just After the Assembly is Loaded and ModuleInitializerAttribute for details.

Support for IncrediBuild (Experimental)

If you use IncrediBuild, PostSharp can now be executed on a remote computer. Please contact PostSharp support for details.

Support for ASP.NET v5 (Experimental)

You can now use PostSharp in ASP.NET v5 code. The support is currently limited to the .NET Framework (CoreCLR is not supported). Support is not built-in in the normal PostSharp distribution. You need to download the PostSharp.Dnx project from GitHub. Please see https://github.com/postsharp/PostSharp.Dnx for details.