Finally got to see Anders Hejlsberg reveal the new features in C# 4.0 today. As expected, nothing hugely radical. But the new ‘dynamic’ keyword did inspire one thought that I shared with a couple of guys in the ask-the-experts session and Dave Remy suggested I should blog it, so I shall… Three years ago as part of the LINQ wave of announcements for C# 3.0, Anders introduced anonymous types and this necessitated the ‘var’ keyword. Now we all know this is just a static inferred type declaration, we’re all cool with it now, but at the time there was...
With a combination of jetlag and a persistent cough keeping me from sleeping, it seems like a pretty good moment to jot down some thoughts on the first couple of days of the 2008 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, “the first PDC in the history of PDCs”, as Don Box said, “where Microsoft has not launched a new data access stack”. My overall feeling about this PDC is that MS has fluffed the marketing angle really badly. There doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent story behind this PDC launch wave. MS will tell you this is the “Software + Services”...