So Microsoft has made Visual Studio 2010 available but I’m going to skip it for now as my “learning queue” is jammed packed already after coming off of a 2 year Flex/Actionscript jag back into the Microsoft world. I had previously gotten used to C# 2.0 features (mainly generics) and now I am processing all the 3.0 goodies such as:

* Implicitly typed local variables
* Anonymous types
* Extension methods
* Object and collection initializers
* Lambda expressions
* Query expressions
* Expression Trees

And then the 3.5 stuff like the new LINQ features. Once I look beyond the language there are (among many others) WPF (which I know), Silverlight 2 and 3 (which I am getting better at), ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework, .NET RIA Services (all of which I have the basics under my skin) and a few others that escape me!

It may be a blessing that I’m putting off Visual Studio 2010 because as the language evolution of C# and VB may be slowing, new ones are coming. I read IronPython in Action to get a feel for dynamically typed languages and the DLR but now F# will be a full fledged CLR compliant language in Visual Studio 2010 and it may be a popular one at that. Its a statically typed language (like C#) but apparently you do not have to explicitly declare your variables (I guess the compiler figures it out like it does for anonymous methods).

So friends, Adapt or Perish applies more than ever in this programming business of ours. Clean up the glasses and get studying and have fun!- Cheers!