SharpCrafters, makers of developer tools for the Microsoft .NET developer platform, recently announced the availability of the PostSharp 2.1 RTM, an aspect-oriented framework engineered to fuel an optimized user experience with new features and improved performance since its first community technical preview in January. The RTM delivers a fast, clean, and trusted development experience, enabling developers to encapsulate common support behavior, such as exception handling, into classes that can be applied using custom .NET attributes.

“There were a number of grey areas in the previous release that needed fixing,” said Gael Fraiteur, SharpCrafters Founder and PostSharp’s Principal Engineer. “We improved the user experience, included some new powerful features, and most importantly addressed a major pain point reported by users: build-time performance.”

Indeed, even before the RTM, customers using the community technical preview reported tremendous build-time performance improvements over the previous version. Software engineers at Comarch, a global IT business solutions provider, measured build-time performance results across a small number of very large projects (assemblies of several megabytes) and reported speeds of more than five times faster than version 2.0.

One of the most cited benefits of PostSharp is time saved in reading and writing by the removal of boilerplate code. The team at Siemens Audiology experienced the time savings first hand. “Releasing developers from writing boilerplate or infrastructure code helps my team to complete features faster, “ said Bernd Hengelein, the software architect behind Siemens Audiology’s development team. “While total cost savings may be difficult to quantify, we definitely saved coding time. We were relieved from writing the code for INotifyPropertyChanged and creating ICommand properties needed for data binding. We also avoided errors/bugs which would have occurred by forgetting to raise the appropriate PropertyChanged events.”

Another cited benefit of PostSharp is improved collaboration within development teams. Because the tool provides a cleaner separation of concerns in complex applications, it enables teams to isolate their architectural patterns from business logic code. This frees more team members to fuse deep technical knowledge with their intimate knowledge of the company’s business processes.

The team at Thales Information Systems, a business unit of Thales Group, not only experienced better team collaboration but also improved productivity among junior developers. “By giving them code that was much simpler, because it was just the business logic and nothing more, I think for them it was much easier to maintain and easier to [reproduce] for similar cases,” said Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe, architect and senior engineer at Thales Information Systems. “So it really helped them to do the development much faster. They were much more productive and were able to implement the functionality much more quickly, which really helped to reduce the number of bugs in the business logic.”

SharpCrafters continues to be at the forefront of .NET developer tools and is attracting other Fortune 500 companies like US Airways, eBay, and Bank of America, as well as educational institutions, government organizations worldwide, start-ups and non-profits.

Key additions to the RTM include:
• Improved Build-Time Performance with reported speeds of more than 5x faster than version 2.0 in some projects
• Architecture Validation allowing developers to create build-time validation of design rules
• Extended Reflection API which enables developers to programmatically navigate code references
• NuGet Packaging and improved no-setup deployment experience
• Obfuscation Support for Dotfuscator, the leading obfuscator for .NET
• Silverlight 5 support
• Compatibility with Code Contracts 4

PostSharp comes in two editions: the free Starter Edition, and the paid Professional Edition offering full-featured personal and commercial team licensing.

To learn more about PostSharp and download the free Starter Edition license, please visit the official PostSharp website at http://www.sharpcrafters.com.

To learn more about PostSharp Profession Edition pricing, please visit http://www.sharpcrafters.com/purchase.