I have stayed away from the Visual Studio betas (I beta test enough stuff already, thank you), but the more I hear about the next version of Visual Studio (code named “Orcas”), the more inclined I am to installing it in a VMWare session.
Scott Guthrie has been running a series of blog posts about the new language features coming in “Orcas”. His post about Extension Methods caught my eye. In a nut shell, Extension Methods let you new methods of an existing object type, without having to subclass that object or modifying the object.
You bascailly create a new static class with a static method. The first parameter has the keyword “this” prepended to it. This informs the compiler that the new method should be added to the class referenced by “this”.
Codegear does something similiar with Delphi 2007 to allow it be a non-breaking upgrade from Delphi 2006.
Scott also has a good example of how to use LINQ Extension Methods to query an XML file. That for me was the first I really got the value of LINQ.
Automatic properties look pretty cool. It’s just syntactical sugar, but it goes down pretty good. I have always been in the habit of creating properties for the public variables of a class in C# and Delphi, this makes it a little quicker write on the C# side.