Back in April, I mentioned that we’re going to have a compiler/languages symposium here in Redmond in August called Lang .NET 2006. Erik just announced that registrations are open, so sign up! As it turns out, I’m going to be giving a talk at the symposium. Ignore the title currently on the site (“Visual Basic 9”), here’s my current proposed title and abstract:
Visual Basic: Where are we going, where have we been?
With its third version on the .NET Framework, Visual Basic has largely completed the process of moving from its previous home in COM to its new home in the CLR. As a full-fledged language on a premier runtime platform, the inevitable next question is: Now what? This talk will discuss future directions for the Visual Basic language, both from a short-term and long-term perspective. Integrating data access and XML directly into the language is the next major challenge on the horizon, and we will cover some of the interesting insights and challenges that have arisen from this work. We'll also take a look back at Visual Basic's dynamic language and scripting roots to see what lessons from the past might be brought into future versions and look ahead at where the language might be headed in the long run.
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