The Future of C#

Please Note: This session will be repeated on October 29th at 3:00PM. In this talk Microsoft Technical fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg outlines the future of C#. He describes the many forces that influence and shape the future of programming languages and explain how they fit into C#.
  • Anders Hejlsberg
    Anders Hejlsberg is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division. He is an influential creator of development tools and programming languages. He is the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of the Microsoft .NET framework. Since its initial release in 2000, the C# programming language has been widely adopted and is now standardized by ECMA and ISO. Before his work on C# and the .NET framework, Hejlsberg was an architect for Visual J++ development and the Windows Foundation classes. Before joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg was one of the first employees of Borland International Inc. As principal engineer, he was the original author of Turbo Pascal, a revolutionary integrated development environment, and chief architect of its successor, Delphi. Hejlsberg co-authored "The C# Programming Language", published by Addison Wesley, and has received numerous software patents. In 2001, he was the recipient of the prestigious Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark.
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#Nov 4th, 2008 @ 6:40 PM
Vineel
Vineel
Anders you are the ONE........
compiler services you mentioned in the end of the show is awesome.
keep going. 
#Nov 5th, 2008 @ 5:46 AM
Nossi
Nossi
This is so amazing that I almost crapped my pants . . . Compiler as Service is darn awesome. The named default parameters are pretty awesome too, I have been missing them since C.

The "dynamic" stuff needs to be taken with criticism - I guess many untrained developers such as students might mistake C# for a scripting language. I am afraid of the day I get a piece of code saying 1000x dynamic and a 1000 times var and not a single type name in it. . .
#Nov 7th, 2008 @ 1:59 AM
tkrasinger
tkrasinger
That surely was an impressive presentation, but I also have some questions:
Refering to the example he brought with the Method WriteBag(), I'm wondering what would have happened if he wrote AvgPrice instead of Price.
Calling the method with the dynamic type - for my opinion - woul have thrown some kind of "IndexOutOfRange" exception because this Property was not in the bag.
Calling it with the var, I guess would throw a "MissingMemberException".

Without any intellisense I'm wondering how you really would write code in the way he showed that office example. I guess I don't even know all my methods of the code I have ever written, so I might really be unable to just go on and type: > myObject.SomeMethod(withTheRightArguments)
without any IntelliSense. I might not know what I'm actually calling there. So I guess developers would write code with static typing and then refactor it to dynamic? No they won't.

The compiler as Service is quite nice, but I guess you can find about hundrets of Scripting-Hosts written in C# doing in memory compile and further more. I for my self have just do this by calling one of my classes: Active.DynamicClassCompiler.Compile(string code) and I could go on with the compiled class ...

#Nov 7th, 2008 @ 12:04 PM
jordanterrell
jordanterrell
Where do we go to provide feedback on C# so that Anders and his team will get the feedback?
#Nov 10th, 2008 @ 4:50 AM
lassevk
lassevk
Hi, can you guys (and by that I mean many of the PDC talkers) please avoid having white text on yellow background and similar clashing colors? Smiley
#Nov 11th, 2008 @ 6:25 AM
Portella
Portella
Portella
/emote "Anders points his keyboard at you"
/say Anders "gief me all you got!"
#Nov 11th, 2008 @ 6:25 AM
Portella
Portella
Portella
at the c# future discussion board in the msdn forums i think if not try the codeplex project there you will find the link for it.
#Nov 12th, 2008 @ 10:44 AM
magicalclick
magicalclick
Amazing. The compiler as service is the future although I don't have any use for now. The new interop improvement is really great. And dynamic type is really nice for certain situaltions. Instead of using function pointers, I can use dynamic object and call the functions.
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