One of the potentially most important topics to emerge from Microsoft Research recently ... at least in my opinion ... is Xen, described in a paper by Eric Meijer, Wolfram Schulte and Gavin Bierman, Programming with Circles, Triangles and Rectangles . The fundamental idea behind Xen is that object-orientated programming (circles), relational data (rectangles) and XML data (triangles) are, for want of a better term, different shapes. The idea behind Xen is to remove (some of the?) problems arising from that basic reality.
Robyn Peterson has written an article on Xen, Microsoft Expands .Net With Xen , giving one viewpoint on what Xen might become.
I am less sure that Xen is necessarily suited only as an extension to C#. I don't see any obvious reason why Xen can't also be applied to, for example, VB.Net.
My guess is that Xen, if it moves out of the research lab, will appear in the Visual Studio "Orcas" generation of products. Xen, or something like it, is one to watch for the future, in my opinion.
Xen is a successor to the mysterious X# language about which rumours circulated a year or two ago.
Posted by Andrew Watt at January 26, 2004 02:25 PM