Egil Hansen

Today I attended a very fascinating two hour lecture at DIKU where Mads Torgersen (Program Manager at Microsoft) talked about LINQ and how it works. He especially focused on the different ideas and technologies that Microsoft uses under the hood to make it less of a pain for the rest of us when working with data. One of the things that he focused a great deal on was how principles from functional programming are being introduced into the C# and the .NET framework.

A funny side note: I was sitting next to a professors who teaches a course on functional programming that they make every first year student take, and he said numerous times that “this is a great advertisement for my course”, and I do understand why he is was excited. I remember back when I was dragged kicking and screaming through that course, wondering why I needed to learn this weird kind of programming that wasn’t even used in general practice, but now, all of a sudden, this guy from Microsoft is typing in lambda expressions in Visual Studio on the projector, God knows I never thought I would see a lambda expression again after that course .

Back home from the university I goggled around a bit and found two interesting videos featuring another Dane, Anders Hejlsberg (Chief Architect of C# at Microsoft). In the first video Anders gives an introduction to benefits LINQ will give you as a programmer using easy to understand code examples, and in the second video he talks more theoretically about the problem that LINQ solves and also gets into what capabilities functional programming will bring to the table down the road. Both videos are well worth the time.

More information can be found over at The LINQ Project page on the MSDN network.