Amanda Silver on Visual Basic 2008 and the future of VB

Annoyingly I am on leave today and my wife has a long list for me that doesn't include 27mins to watch this video.

~~P.S. I will update this post once I get a chance to watch it!~~

Got to watch it today. Definitely worth a watch if VB is your thing - although don't expect any huge announcments. Quick summary

Amanda starts by talking about a session she did at TechEd - including how she demonstrated "build your own LINQ" to explain LINQ and how the foundations were laid with changes in CLR 2.0 e.g. type inference (Option Infer)
6:00 mins in and the conversation moves on to talk about dynamic languages (think Python, Lisp etc) and the relation to VB. Edit and Continue comes up a lot
9:00 in and Edit and Continue and the challenges to add it in VS 2005 are discussed in lots of detail (Many teams - clr, debugger, languages, ide and 11 months of work") and yet limitations remain - can really only edit contents of a method, not types.
12:00 and Amanda starts to discuss how ability to change types might be implemented - using a new dynamic type that sits above normal clr types. Methods would be able to be added and removed etc.
15:00 Amanda explores how intellisense capabilities might be increased during the debug experience
17:00 Discusses the problems of COM types
22:00 Amanda talks about a feature which was pulled from VS2008 but sounds extremely likely to be in the next release - getting rid of the line continuation character in many cases (which will make all of us coding LINQ very happy). XML Literals was the first example of a feature in VB that spanned lines.

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