VB 9.0 Won't Support Collection Initializers (or Array Initializers!)

Paul Vick answered my Will Visual Basic 9.0 Have Collection Initializers? question in his June 27, 2007 What's in VB 2008? What's out? post. The answer, as I anticipated, is no. However, I was surprised to learn that VB 9.0 won't have array initializers, either. My limited tests indicated that array initializers were behaving as expected (i.e., like C# array initializers) in Beta 1. Paul says:

For VB 2008, we will only support initializing read-write fields of non-collection objects.

And explains the disappearance of array and collection initializers as follows:

Our original plans, going back to PDC05, included several more features for object initializers, such as being able to write to read-only properties, as well as collection and array initializers. In the end, the schedule for VS 2008 was not sufficient to implement these features with a high degree of confidence. Which unfortunately means that they will have to wait to a release beyond VS 2008.

Array and collection initializers deliver a major productivity boost, especially for unit testing where you don't want to hit the database because of greatly increased test times.

On the LINQ front, VB 9.0's lambda expressions won't support statement blocks, but that's been known for some time and probably isn't a major issue.

I was surprised to learn that the VB 9.0 compiler will deliver expression trees. Neither the September 2005 "Overview of Visual Basic 9.0" .doc file or the current HTML Overview of Visual Basic 9.0 version of February 2007 mentions expression trees, so I assumed

Technorati tags: VS 2008, VB 9.0, Orcas, LINQ, LINQ to SQL, Collection Initializers, Array Initializers

that support for writing them with VB was gone, too.

I doubt if you'll see many expression trees written in VB. Folks who write custom LINQ for Whatever implementations for specialized data domains are certain to do so with C# 3.0.

On the whole, I think most—if not all—developers who prefer writing VB code would rather have array and collection initializers than the capability to write expression trees.

Slightly off-topic: The more C# 3.0 LINQ code I write, the better I like C#'s "fat arrow" lambda (=>) operator (argument-list => expression-or-statement-block) rather than VB's forthcoming inline Function(argument-list) expression syntax.