Excellent article on the features of the future VB 9
I just read this article on the features of the future VB 9 language. The features I like the most are Linq (for both SQL and XML) and extensions. I know extensions are going to be criticized by OOP fundamentalists, but it is oh so useful and will solve so many problems purists should really just relax and enjoy. Actually, if you take a close look to Linq, you may notice that it is made possible by extensions: the where, order by and other operators are really just extensions on enumerable types from what I understand. This, with some magic reflection and database interfacing, gives you the ability to query any object graph.
The dynamic language features are also very nice to have and will give VB and C# some of the elegance and productivity of dynamic languages without throwing compile-time type safety out the window.
The article actually gives the weird impression that the VB team is currently more advanced in its work than the C# team (but I'm confident that the latter will catch up).
Read on: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/vb9overview.asp