Comment Feed for Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C# (Going Deep on Channel 9)

Re: Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Mohamoud — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:56:25 GMT

Anders and Erik for the Nobel Peace Prize (a)

Re: Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Kareem — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:57:13 GMT

In position 02:07 in the WMV File Version you can hear how he got a new email,...ROFL

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Bent Rasmussen — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:33:15 GMT

Static extension methods: A non-feature.

[code language="csharp"]public enum Date { Yesterday, ... } public static DateTime Yesterday(this Date date) { var t = DateTime.Today; if (date == Date.Yesterday) t = t.AddDays(-1); ... return t; }[/code]

Besides, having yesterday be relative to a given date is more generic.

Re: Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

FFE — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:04:01 GMT

Very nice. Thank you.

Re: Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

unlock iphone — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:15:42 GMT

C# future will be bright anyhow

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

trickyt — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:41:20 GMT

(Really a wish for LINQ) Enumerable.Empty, i.e., return an empty sequence. Silly to ask for something so trivial but it's missing! And of course it needs a nice literal...

Enumerable.Empty<T>() is of course the current way this is implemented, but what would a literal look like? There's lots of literals used for it in other languages, but I mean in C# style.

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Charles — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:27:45 GMT

What did you think?
C

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Daniel Earwicker — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:46:08 GMT

Steve, I want the same thing, an extensible language. It's a real shame that the "syntactic sugar" (anything that can be specified in terms of other language features: the using statement, the Linq queries) was not built using a macro-like system that user could also take advantage of.

You may be interested in the answer I got to this question.

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Daniel Earwicker — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:29:09 GMT

Enumerable.Empty is already there.

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Clinton Lee — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:38:21 GMT

When they were speaking about using 'macros' for common tasks in c# for repeditive tasks (like property persistence, events on changes, etc), would a solution to this to be to introduce Aspects or AOP into the language? Have they ever thought about it? Or is it still too 'immature'? Just curious.

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Justin Van Patten - MSFT — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:26:23 GMT

.NET 4 will have new APIs for lazily and efficiently enumerate files/directories. The new APIs return IEnumerable<T> and are meant to replace the existing APIs that return arrays. Some more info is available in the following blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam/archive/2008/11/04/what-s-new-in-the-bcl-in-net-4-0-justin-van-patten.aspx
I'll be blogging more about these APIs in the next couple of months, so stay tuned to the BCL team blog if you're interested in learning more.

Cheers,

Justin Van Patten
Program Manager
Microsoft, CLR

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Jason Olson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:31:28 GMT

Yes, androidi beat me to it. My teammate Brian Keller has an excellent post about getting around several of the activation messages you might run into: http://blogs.msdn.com/briankel/archive/2008/10/27/visual-studio-2010-ctp-vpc-dealing-with-activation-messages.aspx.

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

androidi — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:45:35 GMT

Before letting it load the OS for first time, set the clock to 2008 november (maybe october will work too not sure).

Also use http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/11/28/disabling-time-synchronization-under-virtual-pc-2007.aspx
to prevent sync with host clock.

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

sylvan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:51:52 GMT

So I was going to play with the .Net 4.0 CTP and went through the huge hassle of downloading 14 separate files etc. etc., but when I actually load it up in Virtual PC the windows server installation on it asks me to activate! Is there some time restriction on the CTP or something or do I need to manually type in some key (I've looked, couldn't find one)?

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Allan Lindqvist — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:21:48 GMT

thats all i needed to hear man (although i wouldnt protest if i was told more ;) )
i certainly dont want you, channel9 or the interviewés to get in trouble from the bosses because you said too much :)

i went back and rewatched that accerator video and it really does sound like linq, with the expression trees and lazy eval..
the bits are really cool and also made me realize just how much i love generics and lambdas :D

atleast it seems gpgpu things are not not beeing worked on ;)
cant wait to hear more (here's hoping for announcement @ mix :D )

Re: Re: Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Charles — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:41:54 GMT

Re: targeting GPU, yes, of course; there are both research projects and incubation in this area inside MS. Nothing is ready for public disclosure, however and therefore I can't/won't comment on the specifics. As for Accelerator, it's most likely not dead....

Remove the tin foil hat,
C

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Charles — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:39:11 GMT

Many more E2Es with Erik on the horizon.
C

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

AdityaG — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:52:15 GMT

I think my favorite feature in C# will be the stuff they are doing with parameters (named parameters, hallelujah!).

P.S. Is it just me or is this like nerd gold. Seeing Erik go into his self-thinking/trying to ask a question while getting lost in the expanse that must be his brain is awesome. Please do more videos like these Charles! :D

Re: Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Allan Lindqvist — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:21:35 GMT

this is total conjecture and rumor mongering but i firmly belive that GPGPU processing are in the works for .net :P
long time ago (2006) there was something called the accelerator project, there was even a channel9 video about it:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Programming-in-the-Age-of-Concurrency-The-Accelerator-Project/

in another video chalres did with joe duffy and his team there is mention that joes team is talking to "all those teams" when charels asks about a few msr projects including accelerator

at the pdc one of the speakers mentions that "those guys [refering to another .net team] are translating linq queries into shaders" this only mentioned in this one sentence and is never talked about again in the sessions, i thinks its still a secret and the speaker slipped a little

also, brian beckman, who has worked on gaming related stuff is working on something secret that seems to be related to .net. this is mentioned in this video
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Brian-Beckman-The-Zen-of-Expressing-State-The-State-Monad/

again, this is just me extrapolating from a bunch of out of context statements and my own wish for something like that :) (.net would pwn with linq-to-gpu) and ive got aboslutily no response from anyone at microsoft when i've asked about this stuff (thought that to me adds to the likelyhood of something beeing in the works :P)

--edit--

the accelerator project is still around it seems, but it hasnt been updated for a while :
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/Accelerator/
there are bits you can download though :)

charles i know ive nagged about an update on accelerator but pleeeeese try and get something from them or duffy or whoever :) i really like to know if im on to something or if i should just fashion a tinfoil hat right now :D

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Ralph Trickey — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:44:04 GMT

I'm going to be a heretic and flatly state that Anders is wrong about one thing, and I drank the kool-aid starting back with Turbo Pascal.

We're going to see a /parallelize switch on the compiler. It may be C# 7+, but we're going to see it. I remember the arguments against garbage collection, against dynamic typing, etc.

We will probably see 8+ cores on the user's desktop and 16+ cores on the developer's machine, and probably 16Gig, and that's enough to crunch one heck of a lot of graphs for a compiler. Most programs aren't the worst-case type of scenarios that people talk about, people still think linearly, so while I wouldn't expect the parallelize switch to work on Word or Excel, or any paint programs, I would expect it to be able to make enough use of parrallelism to make it twice as fast on a standard application as a single threaded program, even if it uses all 8+ cores to become twice as fast. It's going to be innefficient as anything, but it's still a 'free' 2x improvement in speed.

Will the /parallelize switch become anything more that a gimmic to make old programs and casual games run faster? That I don't know. That's where my crystal ball fails me. Seeing what they're doing with the task parallel library, I wouldn't be too surprised if between that and the software transactional memory that doing something like running multiple copies in parrallel and simply throwing away the unused portions (somthing like what the CPU does) may not make it possible to do a lot more with the compiler and library to parrallelize than Anders thinks is possible. We also may see more fine-grained parallelism and SIMD type stuff built into the VMs/CPUs. On the other hand, I've got a classical CS background, understand compiler design, and remember the 1K machines, not those behemoth 64K machines that Anders was talking about. I know how difficult the problem is, but it only has to be solved once.

My random 2c,
Ralph

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Daniel Smith — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:21:51 GMT

Here's an example of how I'd implement extensions:

public extends DateTime
{
   // Extension property
   public DateTime Tomorrow
   {
      get { return this.AddDays(1); }
    }

    // Extension method
    public DateTime SetTime(int hour, int min, int sec)
    {
        return new DateTime(this.Year, this.Month, this.Day, hour, min, sec);
    }

    // Static extension method
    public static int DaysBetween(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate)
    {
       return endDate.Subtract(startDate).Days;
    }
}

Notes

The "this" keyword represents the instance of the object the extension method/property is attached to.

Benefits

There is no need for a dummy "this" parameter on the extension methods as with the old syntax.
Extensibility - it would be easy to see how other extensions could be added e.g. indexers, etc.
Keeps all your extensions for a class together.
Clean, concise, familiar syntax without any freaky context keyword tricks.
Other than the enclosing "extends X" everything inside the braces is normal code.
The same rules that classes use for the "this" keyword apply to the new "extends X" construct i.e. the "this" keyword can only be used in the non-static extension methods.

Downsides

Would make the original extension method syntax redundant :-)

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Art Scott — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:18:25 GMT

Thanks. It's all good.
If you don't have 70 minutes, some good bits, at approx. times:
- "continous design", 29:04
- "C 6.0 ...37 years..." , 38:--
- "OO v Fun ..." , 60:--
- For sure "... look at that shirt ..." , 64:--
- "... create new language ..." , 65:--
- "... the grass has to be an aweful lot greener over there and there has to be one heck of a giant carrot ...", 67:30
-- How green is the F# garden? And how BIG is the F# carrot? Compared to what ... GM SUV or Toyota Hybrid?
-- Sometimes change is not evolutionary, but revolutionary. See single xPU's in museums, today!
-- Note to self: check out Lynn Hill's group.
- There should be some richness at 42:-- too
- Yes, I have way too much time.
- Let's have some more fun.

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Jeff Klawiter — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:34:22 GMT

SIMD (Single Input Multiple Data) is a CPU term of instruction set extensions. MMX was the first widespread extension followed by SSE, SSE2, 3DNOW and so on. What they have been working on at the Mono project is taking advantage of these instructions where appropriate and exposing an API to call them specifically. It's a logical step since the JIT has knowledge of what hardware it's running on, why not actually optomize for that hardware as much as possible. The performance gains in the situations where it makes sense is quite enormous and this is one of the places where XNA games could see the largest vindication.

As for GPU offloading, I'm unaware of managed work to do it. I'm sure using unsafe bindings hitting up CUDA or GPGPU (Ati needs a better name) could be used.

Re: Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

rciq — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:24:21 GMT

Definitely doable, but due to a few obvious reasons (intellisense, performance, overall complicity) I think nobody would go that far;) However, if you don't care, you can go all out. Turn all your code dynamic and make it do really mad stuff. Imagine some crazy levensthein-distance-powered resolver which corrects your spelling (like "ToStrign" -> "ToString") on the fly, omg;)

Re: Expert to Expert: Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#

Allan Lindqvist — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:54:44 GMT

i've got a question,
if IEnumerable<T> is changed to IEnumberable<out T>, how can things like List<T> implement it?
List<T> does add Ts and doesnt that break the co-variance? can the interface be co-variant and the implementing class not be?
(class List<T> : IEnumerable<out T>)

im sure anders thought of this ages ago but still, it'd be interesting to hear how that fits together :)

-edit-
btw where can we get those cup<T> (cup of T for any non geeks out there) cups :D