Snowball - The Blog

From Channel9, one of the most interesting vids at the moment!

C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team

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 ). 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.