C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Posted By: Charles | Jul 10th, 2008 @ 12:36 PM | 149,049 Views | 59 Comments
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.
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#Jul 27th, 2008 @ 8:29 AM
Ayman
Ayman
Ayman
I am interested in Anders' use of the word service, when he talks about using "the compiler as a service".  This brings up a number of queries, here they are:

  1. Does this mean that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) ideas and principles are moving from the business level down to the compiler and, possibly even, operating system level?
  2. Are we slowly moving towards a future where all system components will be redesigned from the ground up as services to be accessible on demand from anywhere?
  3. Could this team, and may be also the Windows and other teams at Microsoft, benefit from having world renowned SOA experts and Service Design Architects, for example the Microsoft Legend Juval Lowy?

Finally, congratulations to Microsoft and the C# Team past and present on a world-beating product and apologies in advance and please excuse me if I have been presumptuous in any of my questions.

#Oct 15th, 2008 @ 2:25 PM
trickyVikas
trickyVikas

I have a question why the below mentioned code snippet is a forever loop in C# 2.0... I haven't tested it in > 2.0 frameworks but I bet the behavior won't be different..

for (byte index = byte.MinValue; index <= byte.MaxValue;  index++)
{
    // do something forever untill the stack is exahausted...
}

I know the reason but I would like to know the what was exact design decision related to it the way post increment ++ operator is implemented for the BCL type BYTE...

Email: tricky.vikas@gmail.com / gupvikas@hotmail.com     

#Nov 4th, 2008 @ 5:09 AM
Portella
Portella
Portella
Yarg, every time i see Anders in channel 9 or any where in the web is when he and the team are cooking some meal for us. They are the cooks the jammie olivers of programming LOL.
#Dec 21st, 2008 @ 2:46 PM
DJScaN
DJScaN

Guys, I'm current C# user and I use a lot of threading code especially when it comes to delegating on multiple cores. I would like to use my democratic voice to influence some of your decisions, hopefully! Wink I had many projects in my past year where I had to write code that interfaces with hardware such as application that was using C# driver and wrapper around Canon’s digital camera SDKs. I managed to write code in pure C# (of course a lot of it was unsafe and with pointers, but still in C#). Let me tell you something… If it wasn’t for the currently available mechanism in C# when it comes to threading, I mean, the way I create, control, and synchronize the threads and so on I would not be able to do what I’ve done in the past year, especially driver for 60+ models of different cameras in pure C#… The control and power that I have over my threads was phenomenal I just hope you won’t take this away.

Also, I’m closely watching COSMOS (http://www.gocosmos.org/index.en.aspx) project and because of the some “high-level” features it is not yet possible to emit directly into machine code, so netwide assembler is used. I hope that you guys would think about bringing those kinds of features into C# also the ability to talk to hardware directly without any 3rd party APIs and I know it is possible now at some level because I’ve done it with digital cameras through USB but one day I’d like to see a jet flying with C# OS instead of Ada written code…. Please add more cool low level features, I love C# more than C/C++ and I would like to see more stuff like that happening. If they can write a control panel (http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/384637216_4c85a7bbd8.jpg?v=0) in DotGNU for a laser in Europe why can’t we have more for system programming in current official C# distributions?

http://flickr.com/photos/t3rmin4t0r/384637216/

J/K >- Hi! My name is "Blank" and I’m a C# addict, I WANT MORE LOW LEVEL FEATURES in C#!

#May 16th @ 8:13 AM
Fabio Olvieira
Fabio Olvieira

Congratulations C9! this video very, very interesting ...... still more with a team's expert.

I'm waiting for C# 4.0...

see you later....

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