The Future of Visual Basic

I'm here at DevTeach in beautiful Montreal! And man, what great weather they are having so far. I'm in a t-shirt overlooking the Cathedrale Marie-Reine-Du-Monde and Dorchester Square. I just arrived last night and the pre-conference sessions are already underway with Rod Paddock and Jim Duffy. I spoke with them briefly during their break and Rod mentioned that he's been impressed with the clean-up of the VB DevCenter and likes the content I've been contributing there and here on this blog. Thanks Rod!

On Thursday I'll be doing my session called The Future of Visual Basic. In this session I'll take you through building applications in VB 9.0 using Visual Studio "Orcas" and the new VB language features including LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML. I'll showcase VB's relaxed delegates, anonymous types, extension methods, lamdbas, type inference, and XML literals. That will take up most of the session but I'm also going to show beyond VB 9.0 with a demonstration of VBx (VB 10, the next next version) and some of the VB team's early thinking on harnessing the dynamic nature of Visual Basic with the Dynamic Language Runtime. If we have time I'll also build a Silverlight 1.1 application with Blend and Visual Basic. It should be a great session!