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Arjen goes MS

So, before hopping on my plane from Seattle to Chicago on Tuesday, I met with one of the C# compiler developers at Microsoft (thanks to CJ for arranging!) and this was indeed a very interesting chat.

You may know that 40% of the MySQL userbase uses the Windows platform in one form or another. What you may not know if you don’t use Microsoft stuff, is that Microsoft is actually surprisingly open about many things; you can get inside info about what they’re working on, documentation on nearly everything, and so on. Basically, one of the few things not open is their sourcecode ;-). I’ll grant you that’s a key aspect in many cases, but still… consider that Google uses open source and releases some too (see code.google.com) but is otherwise a very closed company. Just to give a crude comparison how the world is not just black&white.
Anyway, talking to this developer was just one programmer talking with another (he used to work on the Watcom C compiler long ago, and I used to be a user of Watcom on DOS and OS/2 – shared history!) and it was very useful for both of us, I think.

The short story of what we discussed: C# version 3 has LINQ and DLINQ. Operations on for instance arrays and database tables (including those with equi-joins) are integrated into the language syntax. All of it can be done already (and in other languages too), so this is basically syntactic sugar. However, the way it’s done actually looks pretty good; sugar can be good! More info at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/linq/. They only just started coding on it the other day (there was a proof of concept earlier) so it’ll be a while yet before betas of the new stuff becomes available.

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