When Take That first came on the seen Robby Williams was a young sexy super stud, loved by all, women wanted to be with him, men wanted to be him (ok, maybe the analogies not perfect). Now he’s a slightly overweight widero who chases flying saucers.

And so C#. When it came out (easy!) developers flocked to it, hailing it’s development speed over C++, and hoisting it’s strongly typed compile time error detection pants up the flag pole of integrity. Now, with C# 4 around the corner, those panties have slid down the pole a bit, as MS have seen fit to invite a bloshy Dynamic Runtime Library sorry, Dynamic Language Runtime (- what every it’s called!) to the party.

What am I going on about? Well, MS have stated that they want to bring VB, and C# much closer, so that new features in either language (read C#) are deployed at the same time in both. Other stuff that’s coming with the new release of .Net is the Dynamic Runtime. I’m no expert – in fact what I am is a Luddite on a soap box – but for this to work (with out having to write 10 million lines of code), C# has to have much of the features of VB, basically dynamic types. This is not necessarily a requirement at the developer code level, but required to make the language work with external object. This in turn means that .Net can work more directly with Office and all other components developed in other languages! – cool!. Hence why they can get rid of the dreaded PIA’s.

Along with this MS are making other changes, like named arguments and not having to write ref missing 10 billion times to fill out all the optional parameters. Also in VSTO deployment is getting better too.

So the point? well 2 things really:
1. In both VB and especially C# it’s getting easier to develop,… for Office.
2. C# and VB are getting even more alike, expect to see “with {}” some time soon. Why an organization would invest in developing 2 languages that both have the same strengths and weakness is for Stevie Bulmmer to debate, but I can’t see the point can you?

As always, M.I.E will be the 5th or 6th to bring you slightly wrong information about the latest developments in the world of Office and .Net.

Some links worth reading if you want to find out more:
The Future of .NET Languages
Office client developer enhancements with VS 2010
VSTO news