Hi All

Thought you’d be interested about this. I’ve just read ScottGu’s recent post about the new c# features in Orcas and I’ve posted a blog I hope you may find interesting.

Here

Cheers

Andy.

Good post, Andy. Microsoft just continues to underwhelm everyone every time they make an announcement or release a new product. I really don’t know what’s going on.

I used to be excited to see a new Microsoft product come out; now I just get skeptical :-)

Either I’ve gotten smarter and so am now harder to impress, or Microsoft has gotten worse.

Perhaps a little of both, I suppose.

i actually think those two features look handy. not earth shattering, but then incremental improvements to established languages probably never will be. the new object initialisers looks like they’ll save the effort of creating a whole heap of overloaded constructors, and the getter/setter shortcut (which is new to me) will be nice to have to.

both of these features look rubyish to me. why complain when features from one great language get brought into another? surely that’s a good thing?

Jon, I think you’re right, that bringing Ruby-ish features is a good thing.

I guess I’d prefer if they stopped working on C# and the weird LINQ syntax, and spent their time implementing Ruby for the CLR instead. Instead they’re basically getting that for free by having students work on that instead (http://www.plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET). Well, not exactly for free – my understanding is that the project is being “supported” by Microsoft, which I guess means financial support of some kind.

Sure would be nice if, for once, Microsoft could turn an idea into reality in less than, say, 6 months. So to wait a year or so for some incremental improvements to C# and some weird LINQ stuff, is just frustrating.

But then I take deep breath, and go back to coding in Ruby, and I’m feeling better after a minute or two :-)

Jon don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about MSFT looking at ruby, I just feel with the big fan fare they play on that it is pretty underwhelming that their first big announcements for C# V3 is a clone of stuff you can already have in other languages. What I would like them to do is use their massive resources to focus on pain points we have as developers, rather than looking to sprinkle syntactic sugar to make C# V3 look cool and act like ruby….if you want to devleop in a dynamic language you can with IronPython, there is no need to try and shoe horn C# into that mold.

I think what it shows is the same old Microsoft mentality, of One Thing That Does All. The concept of “the right tool for the right job” isn’t part of their culture.

Remember all the questions with .NET 1.0 of, “What should I use, C# or VB.NET?” The only apparent difference was the syntax. So they said, if you’re a VB programmer, use VB.NET; if you’re from C++ or Java, use C#. The real problem was that they had two languages that both covered all of the CLR in practically its entirety. They were both very big hammers.

So instead of creating a Ruby for the CLR and leaving C# well the hell enough alone, they’ve decided to add MORE features to C# so it can do what other languages do.

Because we all know developers can’t learn more than one programming language, right? Ugh.

Yeah nicely put Jeff. The reason I’ve been using Rails is, because for me, it satisfies a particular developer pain point I felt (still feel) I continously face, which is a web development stack that doesn’t make you jump through hurdles at every point. I wish MSFT would focus on making things they have do that instead of adding features that just try to keep up with the cool kids.