An Introduction to .NET using Visual Basic 9 and C# 3.0

Tutorial T3

By: Erik Meijer (Microsoft)

Abstract

In the past two years I have been working closely with the Visual Basic and C# teams on the design of the next generation of their respective languages. As a result, the next versions of C# and Visual Basic will bring many features such as local type inference, anonymous types, nested functions and lambda expressions, extension members, meta-programming, and monad comprehensions, that we know and love from programming language research into the mainstream.

Visual Basic adds further functionality such as deep XML support, relaxed delegates, strong duck typing, and dynamic identifiers, that leverage it's unique trait of having static typing where possible and allowing dynamic typing where necessary.

This tutorial will give a behind-the-scenes peek into these new language features that will both include their formal semantics using horizontal lines and greek symbols to satisfy the programming language theorist as well as many real-world examples to satisfy the working programmer.

Duration: Half day

Level and Required experience

Introductory

Speaker's profile

Erik Meijer is an architect/language pimper in the SQL Server division where he and Brian Beckman run a small team that collaborates closely with the Visual Basic and C# teams on making programming against data radically simpler. In the past, Erik has worked on real and imaginary programming languages such as Haskell, Mondrian, and Comega.