C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Posted By: Charles | Jul 10th @ 12:36 PM

What's the C# team up to these days? Who's on the C# 4.0 design team, anyway? With the looming problem of manycore facing developers now and certainly in the near future (to a much greater extent - programming for 80 core (asymmetric to boot) processors, anyone?). I thought it was time to find out what Anders et al are working on to get a clear sense of C#'s near (and not-so-near) future so I asked if I could come to one of their design meetings to have an informal chat (are we ever formal on C9?) and meet the people behind the next iteration of the most popular .NET programming language.

There are some new faces (and some old ones (not in terms of age, mind you Smiley

). As expected, merging functional constructs into imperative C# are still top of mind for the C# design team. Here, you'll meet some new programming language gurus and some old time Niners (you'll recall the great Eric Lippert. He was in fact the very first developer we interviewed for C9 back in 2004 - even though his was not the first interview posted, it was the first one shot and the one where Lenn, Jeff, Scoble, Bryn and myself looked at each other and said "wow, we are on to something here!".).

C# 4.0 will contain many new features that will help developers be, yeah, you've heard it before, more productive. There's also some very interesting work going on with adding dynamic constructs to the language, which is of course very interesting given the static nature of the C# language.

In this video you will not get any specific details since the C# team wants to reveal exactly what they've done at PDC 2008. That said, you'll still get a very clear sense of what they've been up to and where they're taking the language.

It's always a pleasure to chat with Anders and team. I think you'll enjoy this one. On a personal note, I was coming down with a cold during this interview so please excuse the asking of the same question more than once (though in a different context). Oh, the joys of cold medicine. You know, the same stuff Lenn was on when he conceived the idea of Channel 9 several years ago.

Tags: Anders Hejlsberg, CSharp, Eric Lippert, Parallel Computing, Paul Vick, Programming Languages

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vesuvius
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

I have been breathless with anticipation on this one.

figuerres
???

MUST WATCH THIS ONE... OMG...

Still trying to grasp all the stuff in the last few versions...

I guess the next few things are for them to create the following "Global Methods"

DoWhatIMeanNotWhatISay(Program P);

SaveThisData(Class C, DataBase DB);

MakeThisDataBaseIntoOOp(Database DB);

oh and:

WriteMyApp( Object FuzzyIdeas);

just a few simple productivity helpers like that Smiley

AthemeX
Here since the beginning

OMG, I can't wait until this downloaded... this must be good Big Smile

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to AthemeX

#Jul 10th @ 2:25 PM

I hope it lives up to your expectations Smiley

I will be interviewing the team again (well, me or somebody else on the C9 team) to really dig into the details. In fact, I want to get Anders for a Going Deep on C# 4.0. He'll no doubt agree to doing this.

C

jason818_253.33
Yippi skippy

Fascinating interview. I found the most interesting part was when the conversation was turned to concurrency.

Borum.NET

I'm really looking forward to PDC this year - and will definitely to be seated up front when the C# team presents the latest ideas and implementations.

If there's one thing I'd really like to see in C# 4.0, then it would be covariant return types. I know it's going to take a new version of the CLR, but please take it into consideration (once more).

AthemeX
Here since the beginning

I'm having some trouble downloading the WMV (High).. anybody else experiencing this? After a while the download just stops and leaves me with a corrupted file Perplexed