BUILD with Anders, Roslyn and NDA

Today was the first day without a keynote session but the first session Marcel and I attended could have easily been mistaken for one when looking at the size of the room, the number of attendees and the speaker. Anders Hejlsberg, Mister C# himself, has gathered a huge fan base over the years. His talks are not brilliant in presentation but because he knows all about C# and does show his love for the language, developers feel very close to him.

The first part of his talk was mainly about Async and Await. Old news to me but apparently a large part of the audience wasn’t that familiar to it (or decided to give Anders credit for his work on these two keywords by responding very enthusiastically to his demonstration. Then Anders showed three new attributes that allow you to access the source file name and line number in code. It is a nice addition.

Then project Roslyn was revealed and a preview announced for October. Roslyn is all about opening up the .NET compiler pipeline with a nice set of interfaces which will allow you to parse syntax, generate code,  search and restructure code from code or live from a ‘command prompt’/immediate window. A cool demo was selecting a bunch of VB code and then right-clicking in a C# project file and picking “Paste as C#” (the other way around works too but who would want to do that?)

The other sessions I attended were a bit of a let-down but I also hooked up with some people from Microsoft and had a good and interesting time (unfortunately under NDA so I can’t write about it)

Now that everything is slowly getting clear I am more and more looking forward to explaining and discussing all of it in context of my work.