Tech Blender

The people building VB 9.0 talked, and I listened (and wrote it down, and got it published)

The people designing the VB 9.0 language were gracious enough to agree to be interviewed. It's now on-line at Dr. Dobbs.

See what Paul Vick, Amanda Silver, Erik Meijer, Alan Griver, Rob Copeland, and Jay Roxe had to say about where VB is going.

Enjoy.

Update: The interview is now on the home page of Dr. Dobbs. www.ddj.com

Information on Visual Basic 9.0

It's up!

Here's information about how querying is being built into VB (a.k.a. LINQ, XLinq, and Dlinq)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/

This can't be overstated. This is the biggest change to VB since the switch from VB6 to VB.NET.

LINQ Revealed at the PDC

Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg just did a demo at the PDC where they showed how C# (and VB.NET) are being enhanced so that the languages contain query functionality.  There's probably a bunch of white papers going live today, but here's what the syntax looks like.

The following code gets the list of running processes by calling Process.GetProcesses.  This is then joined with information in a SQL database that has descriptions of certain processes:

ProcessDescriptionDb db = new ProcessDescriptionDb();
var query = 
	from p in Process.Getprocesses()
	where p.WorkingSet > 1024 * 1024 * 4
	orderby p.WorkingSet descending
	select new {
		p.ProcessName,
		p.WorkingSet
		Description = (
			Fom d in db.processDescriptions
			Where d.processName = p.ProcessName
			Select d.Description
		)
	};

foreach (var item in query)
	Console.Writeline("{0,-30}{1,10:N0} {2}", item.ProcessName, item.WorkingSet, item.Description);

Wild.  I can't wait to see some of the VB syntax.

Get your LINQ on...

Luca Bolognese give the short list of PDC sessions on LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query).

What's LINQ?  Joris Poelmans says:

.Net Language Integrated Query will add query capabilities directly into the CLR and this will be supported by both VB.Net and C#. This means that you will be able to use standard query operators directly from within your code.

Erik Meijer on IQF as a 6GL Language Feature

Following is from the abstract for Erik's "6GL features languages to come" JAOO 2005 presentation:

We will discuss various advancements in Visual Basic towards simplifying the development of data intensive applications. In particular we will concentrate on ways to bridge the impedance mismatches between objects, relation data, and XML and the importance of dynamism in this trend.

The VB presence at JAOO is interesting, no?

Zorro, IQF, LQF, and LINQ

As I head off to the PDC, stay tuned to this category for news data, programming languages, and how them come together.