Anders Heijlsberg presented the future features and extensions of the next release of Visual C# 5.0 during his PDC talk.
The most interesting feature is the new approach to asynchronous programming. Today it is possible but not always very easy to go fully asynchronous. Developers have to write complex code that gets quickly very ugly and incomprehensional.
This is going to change in the future. The next version of Visual C# will get new keywords (async / await) that greatly help to simplify asynchronous programming.
Developers will write their code in a synchronous approach (nothing will change at all). And they will be able to make the code asynchronous just by using the “async” and “await” keywords in the right places.The rest in abstracted out from the programmer.
As it was already done in the Parallel Programming approach, the goal of Microsoft is to keep Asynchronous Programming as simple as possible. Developers may concentrate on added business value and not the environment. These new language features will make C# and .NET even more beginner friendly and will help developers to be much more productive.
You can download the CTP version that you can use for R&D and testing here.
MSDN page that fully explains the new async features :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/vstudio/async%28en-us%29.aspx
