While I was visiting MSR Cambridge this week with some other people from Redmond, Beth put up the Beta 2 version of the Visual Basic Language specification on our developer center--so she got to beat me to the announcement! This updated language specification corresponds to Visual Studio 2008 and covers the following major new features:
- Friend assemblies (InternalsVisibleTo)
- Relaxed delegates
- Local type inferencing
- Anonymous types
- Extension methods
- Nullable types
- Ternary operator
- Query expressions
- Object initializers
- Expression trees
- Lambda expressions
- Generic type inferencing
- Partial methods
The following features are not covered but should be shortly:
- XML Members
- XML Literals
- XML Namespaces
The XML features are a little more difficult because I'm debating how much I should just refer to the XML 1.0 spec, versus how much I should specify explicitly. I'll probably err a little more on the side of the latter, since it'll be necessary for understandability...