C# Language Features beyond Whidbey

Diego Mijelshon  asks

Now that C# 2.0 is almost here, I'd like to know about features that were left out from this release and planned for the future.

We are primarily focused on getting Whidbey polished and out the door right now, so there isn't a lot of thought about features beyond Whidbey right now. Even when we do get into that mode, I probably won't be talking about it.

One of the reasons that we don't like to talk about things when their in the investigative phase is that they are very preliminary. If I said, for example, that we were thinking about adding parallelizing capabilities to C#, then that would be likely to set up an expectation. It might turn out that we weren't able to do that, perhaps because there wasn't a good way to design it, we didn't have time to build it, one of the teams that we were collaborating with changed their focus or schedule, or a multitude of other possible reasons.

Traditionally, we've been fairly binary on this - we don't talk about things until they're already implemented and tested, even if it's fairly sure that we're doing them. We are trying to figure out how to be a little more open in that area.

Eric