Sometimes it can feel a little apocalyptical over here. Outside the skies are brownish red due to the fires nearby, inside I've just been to an exorcism by Doug Purdy. If you think Don Box does put a lot energy in his presentations, you've not seen Doug yet. Both work on Indigo. Yesterday was an introduction on Indigo by Don, today I followed three in-depth talks on Indigo. Well tried to follow three, one was so full I couldn't even get in, had to watch a TV screen in the hallway. It gave me a far better view on what Indigo is, I'll try to blog on that later on. Need to think a litlle more on it first.
Todays top attraction was Anders Hejlsberg. Quite a different talk (those who don't understand Dutch, in my native language anders means different). Anders is the creator of the C# lanuage and did a presentation on the new features in version 2.0. He had quite a hall but in contrast to the talks I had seen so far it was not filled to the last seat. Which is a pitty, he is a geat speaker, and will not speak again this conference.
The new features of C# pop up in every other talk. The custom result sets in Yukon, the reduced amount of visible code of windows- and web-forms, the (de-)serializers in Indigo adapting to the actual type they will (de-)serialize; all of that is made possible in such an elegant way thanks to the new language features of C# (and the CLR). There are two small but very, very handy features I would like to highlight here :
- Nullable value types. You can set an nullable integer to null. Everybody who has done any database programming will like this. To the database 0 and null are totally different things.
- Different visibilty in the getter and the setter of a property. Take this
public string Name {
get { return name;}
protected set {name = value;}
If you want to know more I suggest you buy his book, wednesday there's a signing session at 1pm in the book store.
Thats all for now, stay tuned.