Dev Lab Tuesday
Today we started with a presentation on VSIP program,
Chris Lovett presented "Whidbey XML editor and language service framework",
the XML editor and XSL debugger (isn't Whidbey just great) are shipped as standard
and Chris showed how this was done.
One of the most interesting parts showed how Visual Studio provides both
colourization and intellisense services. One of the most surprising is that
the colourisation is only passed characters on the current line and it is
expected to remember the rest of the line.
As visual studio requires parsing every time the system changes, parsers
need to be fast (in reality can only be lexers).
Kieran Mockford who we all remember as giving some great demonstrations in the UK
over the last few years is now a program manager for MSBuild.
As you would expect Kieran's demonstrations were spot on. There was a lot of interesting facts
presented about whidbey and MSBuild but ...
A great presentation by Shon Katzenburger who is the technical lead on the C# compiler
team, on Implementing generics in your compiler, really made me think about Generic
inference rules. If you are planning to use generics make sure you understand the rules
of inference so you can guarantee which methods are available in the applicable method
pool.
Side Note You need to be careful when defining generics Struct G
I guess I hadn't thought of even doing this due to the standard rule of don't be too clever when you are doing
a design, but it is useful to know.
Jim Hugunin presented on Dynamic Languages on the CLR, Jim started to produce Python on .NET to prove that .NET
did not work as well as other down grade runtimes :), however after proving to himself and others he was wrong he
now works in the CLR team helping others see the power of .NET.