tirsdag, november 14, 2006

Resume of a lecture

I attended Anders Hejlsberg’s guest lecture at ITU Copenhagen last Friday and want to share with all of you the information he revealed.

First of all – it was a great lecture. He showed how all the language features of C# 3.0 together made LINQ possible and explained how they implemented LINQ using every one of these new language features. I must say that C# 3.0 is innovation on a high level, surely a something I will be waiting for with anticipation.

Besides from a great lecture, Anders revealed some information I want to share with you. (I hope MS don’t mind)

Concurrent Programming
The next step, after the release of C# 3.0 and LINQ – the language team will probably focus on concurrent programming. Anders believes that the available constructs for concurrent programming simply are to complex for the average programmer (Threads and so fourth) Therefore they will look at how they can improve the runtime and/or the language to better support concurrent programming, making it easier for developers to take advantage of multiple CPU’s that are getting more and more common in standard PC.

Release of C# 3.0 and LINQ
Anders revealed that the language team currently is improving some details of the compiler for C# 3.0 and we (the general public) will have a beta version of the next Visual Studio codename “Orcas” in about six months. He also ensured that there will be no more CTP – only Betas from now on.

UPDATE 2007-03-09
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Seams that Anders Hejlsberg was wrong :-)Last week a new CTP (March CTP) was released after all. I wonder if the Beta still will be available six months after the lecture ?
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Last note
There will finally be a Set collection implementation available in Orcas. Jubii.

3 kommentarer:

Anonym sagde ...

6 months.. oh man!
thanks for sharing :)

Anonym sagde ...

Interesting stuff, today I've showed our techteam(all developer @ LECTRIC) the roadmap to .NET 3.5(which include C# 3.0). They weren't that enthousiast as Labda Expressions are a bit to virtual for most those guys... too bad :(.

I think an interesting improvements in vNEXT of the languages will be the concurrency. As vNEXT(v4.0?) of the full Framework should finally improve the development time. Although, that's what MS promised a while ago...

Runi Thomsen sagde ...

Yeah, it can be rather hard to understand these funny looking expressions and why they are cool and useful. The fact is that LINQ library could not be implemented without these lambda expressions. The lambda expressions are set equal to an reference of type Expression, which give you an full expression-tree of the function. This enables LINQ to create real SQL statements by inspecting this expression tree.

In addition, the expression tree can be manipulated and compiled (simply by calling a Compile method on it) and you have a new function. This really opens the possibility for partial evaluation and growing adaptive code. Really cool stuff