Scott Wiltamuth's Visual Studio blog : Languages

VS 2010 videos

scottwil — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:16:00 GMT

Check out this new VS 2010 and .NET Fx 4.0 videos page on channel9. We're rolling out a set of videos for this week, including Jason Zander's keynote at Tech Ed in Barcelona, Anders doing q&a on C# 4.0, Lucien on VB 10, and others! If you're curious what we've been up to since releasing VS 2008, this content combined with the PDC videos give you plenty of choices.

If you don't have time to watch the videos, Jason has a good blog post summarizing key news.

--Scott

C# PDC videos

scottwil — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:22:00 GMT

With PDC going on in LA this week, we have a number of new C# videos available:

Anders' PDC talk on The Future of C#, where he describes the work we plan to deliver as part of C# 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010. There are six demos:

Silverlight C#/JavaScript interop improvements using the new dynamic programming extensions.
C#/Python interop using dynamic programming extensions.
Creating a dynamically typed property bag in C# using dynamic programming extensions.
Improvements to Office Automation (bye-bye “Type.Missing” and “ref missing”).
Parallel Extensions to .NET (Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ, aka TPL and PLINQ).
A sneak peek at read-eval-print loop using managed C# compiler.

We have a series of three videos that we did with informIT:

C# 4.0 with Anders Hejlsberg, Mads Torgersen, and Eric Lippert - Part 1 of 2
C# 4.0 with Anders Hejlsberg, Mads Torgersen, and Eric Lippert - Part 2 of 2
A video about the latest edition of our book, The C# Programming Language, Third Edition. The book is literally hot off the presses, so if you're ordering it, make sure you get the Third Edition.

Enjoy!

--Scott

Anders Hejlsberg's "Where are programming languages going?" talk at JAOO

scottwil — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:22:00 GMT

Anders gave a great talk at JAOO last week that I'm watching now, "Where are programming languages going". It provide a good overview of where we see programming languages going, and puts some of our current work in context. Check it out, and feel free to comment here. If there are interesting questions and comments, I'll follow up with Anders and ask him for some comments for a future post.

--Scott

More JavaScript discussion on Ajaxian

scottwil — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:19:00 GMT

Re: my earlier post on the future of JavaScript, there is another interesting item today on Ajaxian: ECMAScript Edition 4: Brendan Speaks Out.

--Scott

The Future of JavaScript

scottwil — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:10:00 GMT

Gabriele Renzi has a good post on the future of JavaScript: "ECMAScript 4, the fourth system syndrome". The concept of a "fourth system syndrome" is a good one, particularly so for programming languages. For mature programming languages, thoughtful evolution is the rule. A revolution is best done with an entirely new language, as this serves two very important purposes: (1) supporting existing users, many of whom presumably like the existing language, by evolving it in parallel, and (2) freeing the new language from the constraints of the old one.

This leads to a kind of punctuated equilibrium, where there are significant periods of steady evolution in existing languages, punctuated by more rapid but discontinuous change driven by new languages. The latter doesn't happen very often, and it is interesting to look at history and consider the conditions or circumstances that favor the creation of new languages.

The ES4 proposal is publicly available. Our JScript team is one of the participants in the ECMA working group, and is very interested in feedback from JavaScript developers on the future of the language.

--Scott

F# Press Coverage

scottwil — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:39:00 GMT

Soma blogged earlier announcing our intent to productize F#, and we are seeing some press coverage of this:

Ars Technica: Microsoft to push functional programming into the mainstream with F# by Ryan Paul
BetaNews: Experimental 'Functional' Language Emerges from Microsoft Research by Scott M Fulton

Dr Dobb’s Journal: F# To Get VS Integration

eWeek: Programming Superstars Eye Parallelism by Darryl K Taft

eWeek: Microsoft to host language symposium by Darryl K Taft

InfoQ: F# to be Integrated with Visual Studio by Jonathan Allen

InfoWorld: InfoWorld Daily Podcast by Tom Sullivan

TechWorld: Visual Studio to use the F word by Paul Krill

VNUNet.com: Microsoft preps functional programming language by Tom Sanders

ZDNet: F# becomes a first-class citizen by Mary Jo Foley

--Scott

Second Life at OOPSLA

scottwil — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:28:00 GMT

There was an interesting session at OOPSLA yesterday called "Second Life: The World's Biggest Programming Environment" by Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner, that covered two main topics.

The first part of the talk was mainly about the popularity of LSL (15% of Second Life users write scripts!), and the effort to move LSL to .NET and Mono, and also to enable other .NET languages like C# to be used to build Second Life scripts. This is very cool!

The second part covered how the LSL team uses Second Life as a communication and collaboration tool for their own software development. Since I had just blogged a few days earlier musing about unified communication for developers, this definitely caught my interest. Linden Lab folks have made what we at MS would call a dogfooding commitment -- all meetings are done in Second Life. The LSL folks use an interesting combination of tools for their collaborative development work, including Second Life features:

a meeting place
presence -- you can and hear see what your co-workers are doing
white board for shared task list
3D audio so you can hear what your co-workers are doing, both in meeting settings and less formal collaboration. E.g., you might overhear two teammates doing a code review on an are of code you know a lot about and decide to join them

and others:

Screen sharing
Twitter
Etc.

As an example, code reviews are done using a combination of Second Life (e.g., audio) and non-SL tools (e.g., screen sharing).

Software development is a social endeavor, and I expect more and more experimentation with social tools and environments like Second Life as part of developers' toolkits.

--Scott

Working with MSR Cambridge

scottwil — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:10:00 GMT

I've been traveling for the last week or so, first to Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England and then to OOPSLA in Montreal.

We have top-notch languages researchers in MSR Cambridge, and this was a good trip to build a deeper relationship with them. Our Redmond contingent consisted of me, Anders Hejlsberg (C#), Mads Torgersen (C#), Paul Vick (VB) and Jim Hugunin (IronPython and Dynamic Language Runtime or DLR). I won't try to list all of the MSR folks we worked with, but suffice to say it was mainly people from the Programming Principles and Tools, and Machine Learning and Perception groups.

We have had some good success in technology transfer from research to product development, including the work that Don Syme (bio ) and Andrew Kennedy did on generics. They did early design and prototyping work for C# and .NET as a research project and continued to be deeply involved after we transitioned this work to product development. .NET chose a "deep" to generics, in which generic types are represented in the runtime type system. This has been critical for later work, including the LINQ work we will release soon as part of VS 2008 and .NET Fx 3.5. Don and Andrew deserve credit for helping us make a good choice on this for .NET 2.0. I expect we will continue to deliver a lot of value on this foundation, value that would be difficult or impossible to deliver with a shallower approach to generics.

In a related note, we recently announced our intention to productize the F# project that Don leads, and this was obviously one of many topics that we covered during our trip.

I'm excited about our collaboration with MSR. Languages affect not just the way we tell our computers what to do, but also how we think about problems and communicate with our fellow developers. Working with MSR on languages is one of the things we do to help us deliver a great portfolio of languages, both now and for future versions.

--Scott