I’m watching a video of the February Indianapolis .NET Developers Association meeting. In this meeting Mark Strawmyer is presenting on changes in C# and Visual Basic coming with the next release. To be fair, the presentations were based off of PDC presentations, so the material was a bit reused. In this blog, I will reuse part of it yet again.
One of the interesting things about the next iteration of these languages is that Microsoft has stated that they are bringing the languages more in line with each other. As such, things in VB have a good chance of showing up in C# and vice versa. Of course, they might not be implemented the same way, but functionality will be very similar over time.
In C# 4.0 and Visual Basic 10, you’ll see several things begin to match up. The following table shows some of the key items coming. Note that the items in italic bold exist already in the given language. The other items will be added.
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| Named/Optional Parameters | Named/Optional Parameters | |
| Dynamic Scoping | Dynamic Scoping | |
| Statement Lambdas | Statement Lambdas | |
| Multilined Lambdas | Multilined Lambdas | |
| Auto-Implemented Properties | Auto-Implemented Properties | |
| Collection Initializers | Collection Initializers | |
| Generic Variance | Generic Variance | |
| Extension Properties | Extension Properties | |
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Of course, not everything will be matched perfectly. For example, you shouldn’t expect XML literals in C#.