HttpCode

Last night I sat down to watch some more PDC sessions, this time it was Anders Hejlsberg presenting The Future of C#.

Anders did a great job presenting, the highlights for me were:

• The general roadmap to v4 – Anders set the expectations around the v4.0 language (also see Eric Lippert’s blog)
• dynamic keyword – Makes COM interop easier, Nikhil has a nice post on what this will mean for JSON.
• optional and named parameters – Again designed to make COM interop easier, no more missing parameters.
• compiler as a service – This was by far and away the most interesting part, he showed off the dynamic compilation features of the complier in 4.0v next, coupled with a great demo showing a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) program that accepts c# code.

I also watched the keynote presentation from Don Box and Chris Anderson where they showed off some of the Azure platform. As with all Don and Chris demo’s it was really entertaining. The key takeaway was that the Azure platform is based around web standards and that all the tools we currently have will work with Azure. Of course that’s not to say that we don’t need some abstraction from some new libraries (isn’t every problem in computer science solved by another layer of abstraction).