Comment Feed for C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team (Charles on Channel 9)

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Portella — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:09:25 GMT

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.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

trickyVikas — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:25:58 GMT

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: gupvikas@hotmail.com

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Ayman — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:29:05 GMT

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:

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?
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?
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.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:42:10 GMT

Many of you have expressed interest in Spec#. I'd recommend that you play around with the most recent version (requires VS 2008).

http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/8826adb9-8398-40d6-a22d-951923fe2647/Details.aspx

Enjoy!
C

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

stevo_ — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:52:03 GMT

I was wondering today if theres any plans to improve the expression support for the compiler.. currently the compiler only accepts lambdas that are trees where a branch is a call to the next.. which makes it impossible to "bake" statement blocks..

It seems to me that the ability to have statement blocks as expressions could be very powerful, for example; you could have an expression as the handler for an enumerator, this could be useful for tools like linq to sql.. because you could do analysis against the expression, and determine which properties are being used.. and thus you could optimize the query to return just the fields that should be called..

I know that example isn't a guarentee, there would be rules about unsafe code still, and you would still need control over this optimization happening or not.. but thats just an example of things that could happen..

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

nyinyithann — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:59:27 GMT

Could you please tell me where i can get the transcript?
Thanks.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Ananth B. — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:20:12 GMT

Very cool discussion. I like that fact that a large focus for C# 4.0 is concurrency. I've been doing a lot of work on LINQ and concurrency (with the Brahma project http://brahma.ananthonline.net). I feel what I'm trying to do is exactly what a part of the discussion was about, which is: introducing a model that allows developers to write code that runs in parallel, without them having to put in a whole bunch of thought. The limitations of query expressions fit very well into a streaming-computation model, which is the feature I've tried to exploit. It is also possible to interleave code that runs on another processor with code that runs on the CPU (an architecture suitable for asymmetric core computing).

Even if included as language features, I feel a LINQ-like provider based model (which allows users to write their own providers) would allow the most flexibility since multi-core processor development is going to be in flux around the time C# 4.0 might be released. Allowing people to decide the model of concurrency to be used, while supporting basic constructs (I feel COmega has some very nifty ideas there). It is also entirely possible that the "scalar" processors we run some part of the code on, may not be x86 (Tesla?).

In all, this is the perfect direction for C# to be heading in. But please, pretty please(?) give us, the developers ways to extend and control this beast's innards.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

beetle — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:20:53 GMT

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:26:21 GMT

Yes. Indeed, sentence composition could stand to gain from a better compiler.

Thanks for testing :)
C

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

strawhat — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:59:33 GMT

Charles (I mean the Charles who wrote the post (as in the one who signed his name (you know Charles))),

You forgot to close one of your '('s

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

rbougha — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:09:30 GMT

Impatiently waiting for this version of C#.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Galo — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:54:43 GMT

Well would there be a UCFirst and IsNumeric this time ? hahahaha :-) just kidding, keep up the good work guys

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

staceyw — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:42:12 GMT

Sounds like your talking about F#. Looks dynamic, but static types and a new language.

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

KubuS — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:48:52 GMT

I've been waiting for it too. Now I can't wait for the details to be announced on PDC :D

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

JChung2006 — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 03:31:24 GMT

Great video, Charles!

With regards to the dynamic typing-static typing dichotomy, it is not either-or. It is not only-but also. We want not only the affordances of dynamic typing but also the assurances of static typing. Type inference sorta fakes us out into believing that it provides this, but it's still static typing, and there are limitations to that approach that cannot be worked around until changes to the type system are made.

Java and C# have been around for a while, long enough to where people will grumble if you make too many changes to the language. If it is impossible to make changes to the language without incurring "-1000" penalties, then maybe it's time for a new language (or perhaps an old one whose time hadn't quite yet come...) to step up and pave the way for programming language innovation. Better ways of getting the job done is the goal.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Judah — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:35:04 GMT

Guys, for over a year now, I've been telling folks at Microsoft that what we want is language constructs that help you write less buggy code.

It should be obvious, but this is the thing plaguing software teams; we write buggy code and we spend a lot of time writing unit tests, physically testing, debugging, and doing formal code reviews -- all in an attempt to get rid of bugs.

C# 4 should add some constructs that help us write software with fewer bugs in it.

For me, this means integrating some of the excellent research done over the last several years by the Spec# guys. The design-by-contract stuff would help us rid our codebase of mistakes developers often make when working on large, complex, real-world software systems.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

evarlast — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:21:34 GMT

Are you taking requests?

Here is my list: http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/2008/05/15/c-vnext-feature-request/

Left out of that list is my request for an extensible literal system. We already have the wonderful TypeConverter system in the BCL. The compiler could use that and I could have extensible literals in the language. Short of that, just list and dictionary literals would be great.

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

staceyw — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:50:51 GMT

I think the tpl works pretty well as an library already (from an perspective). As Anders said; would it make more sense to bake in a "ParallelForeach" keyword in the language - what are you adding? Not sure. Linq needed this kind of sugar in the language to make is cleaner/easier to call the apis. Not sure tpl, as it exists today, would benefit the same way. Some new pattern (that will become obvious when we see it) will probably benefit from lang sugar. I think the big win will be when the pattern becomes "parallel correct" by *construction - which would be a combination of lang features, patterns, compiler, and libraries. I think a pattern of being correct-by- construction (e.g. Erlang) has the most legs.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

sylvan — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:41:07 GMT

Charles, when you're interviewing them next time, it would be great if you could delve into the "intersection" between meta programming (which they said they were working on) and dynamic compilation of code (which they also talked about).
It sounds like there's an exciting opportunity here to combine those two and get run-time specialization of code.

E.g. if you have a regexp matcher that takes a regular expression and a string and returns true if it matches, you could specialize the first parameter of that function for a specific regular expression (which isn't known at compile time, only at runtime) and then run that specialized version on ten million strings. The benefit is that the regular expression would get hard coded into the specialized version so that the matching doesn't have to "interpret" it each time. There's a cost involved in doing thie specialization, but quite often you'll use it so often that the benefit outweighs that cost.

Seems to me like compilation can be viewed as basically the act of "baking in" known facts about your code (e.g. the size of a variable) into machine code so you can execute it faster. Well I'd say that many applications will have "known facts" that may not be true for the entire duration of the program, but will at least be true for "long enough" that it's worth baking them in anyway. Another example is an image filter, where you take the filter kernel and compile it down into machine code and then run it over the image (because the kernel won't change for the duration of the filter operation). A third example is a game where you load a game level, that level won't change for several minutes at least so it would be cool if you could "bake it in" and do all sorts of optimizations under the assumption that the game level is "constant" for some duration of time (e.g. inline calls that are virtual, but since the data is constant you know exactly where you need to go, unroll loops, recursion, do standard constant folding etc.).

Anyway, this is my pet idea for a "killer app" where you'll see all C++ advocates gladly switch to C# for the increased performance, and if you have both meta programming *and* runtime code generation/loading you're basically almost there.

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

wil2300 — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:07:30 GMT

Charles, that is a good point about libraries vs. language constructs. I assume that we are still a little ways from C#4.0 and in the mean time, the TPL library is being consumed and improved. Given that Joe Duffy and Anders seem to talk all the time, then it seems that the TPL library will provide a good test bed for parallelism, which, if successful, can be implemented in the next c# version. I mean the framework exists and not just for c# but LINQ as well. Anyway, just my 2.5 cents.

Re: Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:31:53 GMT

"what I thought you were trying to ask was.. is there any thoughts to changing .NET CIL, as in add to the capability that CIL can describe (such as something like contracts being defined as a pure CIL construct (library aside)."

Well, what I asked I in fact thought about before interpreting and conceptualizing ideas, constructing the word patterns to describe the idea and finally delivering it by mouth. :)

The question is based on the notion that

If your runtime and default libraries are capable of providing functionality that can address specific hardware configurations (especially the runtime engine, but so too the collection of classes that you program with...), then the languages used to manage the manageable parts of the runtime can be very thin. TPL and CCR demonstarte that libraries (with support in the base virtual machine when necessary(e.g., Generics, etc) can provide sufficient capability to program (express) parallelism. So, my question was aimed at exploring the necessity of adding the same or similar functionality to the syntax of the language.

C

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

stevo_ — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:17:04 GMT

Yes, as before they even finished C# 3.0, they were planning 4.0... yadda yadda, this is purely talking about the future of C#.. although not much was given away..

I liked what anders was talking about regarding how he thinks concurrency could be tackled (definately correct me if I'm wrong), which was not to think about code as being concurrently designed or otherwise.. but instead, designing the 'parts' that make up your operation.. and letting the compiler/runtime link all those parts together in the best way possible..

Of course, we always need that overall control, so the challenge I guess is how to do all that.. c'mon guys hurry up!

Also I think when were talking about will there ever be any changes to .net, and the question got routed from language to library.. but I think what you were maybe referring to, or at least what I thought you were trying to ask was.. is there any thoughts to changing .NET CIL, as in add to the capability that CIL can describe (such as something like contracts being defined as a pure CIL construct (library aside).

Maybe its just me, but I'm interested in that question.. although I appreciate that ms wants to avoid changing CIL to avoid compatability problems..

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:47:20 GMT

C# 4.0 is what the C# team is working on these days. It's not about to release.....
C

Re: Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:45:42 GMT

That's just my way. It's in fact an involuntary response to coolness. :)

Re: C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

Charles — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:32:26 GMT

Regarding the download troubles some of you are having:

Our file hosting service provider has told us that they are unable to find a problem (they tested their servers in Europe and can't duplicate the error). They tell us that the problem could have been a transient one due to ISP overload or router issues. They say: "At this point it looks like an intermittent issue that may have passed, perhaps a congested ISP or router on the last mile."

Have any of you tried running a tracerout from your PC to mschnlnine.wmod.llnwd.net? In order to figure this out they need more data. For example, how are you downloading the file (right-click, save as? Playing the video in your media viewer application? Etc...)

C