@ Head

If you want to download the videos to watch later, or to happily play them faster, skip ahead etc, then you can grab the .wmv files instead of having to watch them in a browser in silverlight.  I like to increase the play speed in parts and silverlight doesn't allow that ;)  To get the .wmv's, go to the Agenda page and right click on a shortcut to a video and select Copy Shortcut.  The shortcut will be to a html page. What you need to do is remove the .html and replace it with .wmv, and add the Videos subdirectory to the talks path, e.g:

http://langnetsymposium.com/talks/1-01%20-%20CSharp3%20-%20Anders%20Hejlsberg.html

becomes

http://langnetsymposium.com/talks/Videos/1-01%20-%20CSharp3%20-%20Anders%20Hejlsberg.wmv

And now onto reviews/thoughts:

C# 3.0 by Anders Hejlsberg.

The first hour of this presentation is on c# 3.0 and how they got there.  If you don't get LINQ or how all the language features in C# 3.0 revolve around that watch it, otherwise skip to just before the 1 hour mark where the talk starts to look forward.

Some things to note: Anders states emphatically that VB and C# "will stay roughly in sync" which is something they "are explicitly committing to" as they have both large users bases that have the same innate desire for the same feature set.  So hopefully that puts an end to the artificial segregation I hear people try to conjure up ;)  BTW: was that an Aussie asking that question (Wayne Kelly?) ??? Typical ;)

It was also good to hear they are still trying to figure out a good way of doing INumeric and still looking at making nullable types more intrinsic.

On Expressions trees it seems we will see some improvements going forward. Most notably, expression trees will allow annotations that should make the debugging better.  No-one asked about Edit and Continue with expression trees, which was a shame.  Closures do cause issues there, but apart from that I don't see why we couldn't have E&C, especially if the tree can be easily related back to the source via annotations :)

Expression trees are also likely to support "statements" in the future.  This adds even more pressure for VB to provide support for multi statement lambdas.

On a side note, I raised an eyebrow when I heard Anders say "bloody" in his presentation. He did the same in the last video I watched of him.  Maybe it's a cultural/upbringing thing, but there's certainly nothing nice about bloody unless it is a steak.  If he wants to swear he should say fucking, as we all enjoy that ;)  Of course that wasn't as bad as the unfortunate name one of the questioners had for their language <g>

One funny thing to note was Anders continually referred to namespace importing as "Importing".  Yes that's the Imports keyword in VB, whereas it's the Using directive in C#. Just funny to note how we sometimes use terms from other programming languages, such as I generally use the term static instead of Shared.  Hopefully language designers consider the natural phrases. For example, going forward, is "Extends" really the right word for mix-ins given there's already Extension methods and more significantly it is the general term we often use for inheritance, and as in the case in Java.