Erik Meijer to Deliver Two LINQ Tutorials at ECOOP 2006

Erik Meijer, who describes himself as a "architect/language pimper in the SQL Server division," will conduct two LINQ tutorials at the 20th annual European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) gathering in Nantes (France) on July 3 - 7, 2006. Following are excerpts from the two tutorials' abstracts:

• An Introduction to .NET using Visual Basic 9 and C# 3.0: "[T]he next versions of C# and Visual Basic will bring many features such as local type inference, anonymous types, nested functions and lambda expressions, extension members, meta-programming, and monad comprehensions, that we know and love from programming language research into the mainstream. Visual Basic adds further functionality such as deep XML support, relaxed delegates, strong duck typing, and dynamic identifiers that leverage its unique trait of having static typing where possible and allowing dynamic typing where necessary. • A Language Geek Perspective of LINQ, XLINQ, DLINQ: "This tutorial explains the programming language theory roots (monads and monad comprehensions, lazy/co-inductive functional programming, meta-programming) behind language integrated queries (LINQ) and briefly discusses the language enhancements to support them. We will give an in-depth treatment of the three domain specific APIs that constitute the LINQ framework namely the standard query operators for objects, the new XLinq API for manipulating XML, and the new DLinq and ADO.Net object-persistence infrastructures."

Earlier this year, Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman presented an XLinq demonstration titled "XML Support in Visual Basic 9.0" at the Programming Language Technologies for XML (PLAN-X) Workshop on January 14, 2006. PLAN-X was colocated with the 33rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN - SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2006) held in Charleston, SC on January 11 - 13, 2006. Erik and Brian recently posted to the Microsoft Research site what appears to be a preview of a future, full-length technical paper, "XML Support in Visual Basic 9," that's based on—or forms the basis for—the PLAN-X demo. The paper's sample XLinq code is based on the January 2006 LINQ technical preview. My "Compose XML Content with XLinq Expressions and VB 9.0 XML Literals" post uses similar syntax from the earlier LINQ technical preview for the release version of Visual Studio 2005. Click here for a Google Blog search to display links to recent posts about—or references to—Erik Meijer from the OakLeaf blog. Technorati: LINQ DLinq XLinq C# 3.0 VB 9.0 Visual Basic 9.0 Orcas Erik Meijer