I had the pleasure of spending my Sunday participating in a Techtalk with Anders Hejlsberg and Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft development center in Vedbæk, along with around 350 other developers.

The focus was clearly on Hejlsberg's talk about the future of programming languages, and Steve Ballmer dropped in directly from the airport giving a short so-called pep talk and a little Q&A.

Hejlsberg started out with comparing development in computer hardware with the development in programming languages, stating that there hasn't been a dramatic change from the old Pascal days to C# today - actually the "hello world" in C# is slightly more verbose than in Pascal. At the same time hardware has developed so fast, that his CPU today is a thousand times faster than when he wrote Pascal.

So programming languages evolve very slowly compared to hardware. But what will a mainstream programming language look like in the future, and how will language designers try to help software developers become more productive?

Hejlsberg described how he had literally wasted a couple of years exploring the possibility of doing programming with graphic UI and concluded that sometimes a line of code can be worth a thousand pictures.

He went on to discuss some of the trends that we are seeing in current languages. He discussed how declarative programming will be a great influence in mainstream languages, and talked about functional programming with F# and immutable types and programming with and without side effects.

Hejlsberg introduced what he calls "the elephant in the room", that everybody knows is there, but no one talks about. This is the problem with keeping a presumably ever increasing number of processors busy with our code. In that connection he talked about the Parallel Extensions to .Net 3.5 that is currently out as CTP, and did a little demo showing how it works.

He mentioned dynamic programming languages and features like type inference, that lets us work like we are dynamic, but lets us keep the type safety of static languages.

His prediction is also that we will se a lot more to Domain Specific Languages - languages that are created for a specific purpose instead of being a general purpose language. Especially the internal DSL's like LINQ will find their way into the future languages.

So in short Hejlsberg thinks future programming languages will be declarative, concurrent and dynamic, and the borders between language paradigms will be erased, and we will se the mainstream languages like C# and VB evolve with along the lines of these described trends to become multi paradigm languages.

It was a very interesting talk, and definitely worth the rather long drive from Odense on a Sunday. The whole thing was taped, so I presume it will be available online at some point.

Yesterday I did the third edition of the ANUGCast, which is a new danish podcast about .Net development and community. (It is in danish).

The talk was about the Entity Framework, that I also did a talk about in Odense .Net User Groupt (ONUG) last week.

It went pretty well I think, and we got around both the god and bad of the Entity Framework as well as covered some of the differences compared to other ORM's.

Related Links

• ANUGCast #3 - Entity Framework 1.0
• ANUGCast Podcast Feed

After installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on my laptop with Vista Ultimate I suddenly experienced a lot of crashes while working. The crashes seemed random at first, but also appeared to become more frequent and of course increasingly annoying.

To begin with I figured that something might have been corrupted, as I previously had the SP1 Beta installed as well as a lot of other beta stuff, so I uninstalled everything related to Visual Studio and .Net and a few installed updates, and reinstalled Visual Studio from scratch and updated to SP1.

But that didn't help. Problem was still there, and I was truly puzzled and a bit angry, as I am preparing my Entity Framework talk at ONUG and need to update my demos, and obviously have a stabile environment for the demo (I suppose this is where I start considering a VPC for that purpose).

So now I looked in the event log, where I got the very little informative error message:

"Program med fejl devenv.exe, version 9.0.30729.1, tidsstempel 0x488f2b50, modul med fejl unknown, version 0.0.0.0, tidsstempel 0x00000000, undtagelseskode 0xc0000005, forskydning med fejl 0x777833fe, proces-id 0x1978, programmets starttidspunkt 0x01c9102ed5c3f8a0."

Having no clue what is causing this random error, I decide to notice exactly what I do before the error occurs. I notice that it always happens when I enter debug mode in visual studio. So far so good, but otherwise it just seems totally random.

I decide to make an error dump with Debugging Tools. And now I just have to reproduce the error. Now this is strange, because no matter how many times I entered debug mode it just didn't crash. Typical. Until I finally remember that I had been undocking and redocking my tool windows, because they where cluttering up the interface. And this was it!!

So because I undocked my tools, Visual Studio crashed when entering debug mode. I googled it and found this error report. But no immediate solution, just "Thanks for reporting the issue. It has been reproduced and will be addressed in a future version or patch of Visual Studio."

The only thing to do at the moment, if you have the problem, is to leave the tool windows docked, and if you have to move them or redock them, then first close the window, open it again and reposition it.