I am attending this year's JAOO Conference in Århus, Denmark as student crew. It's pretty nice, I have to work for 2x6 hours during the 3 days, and the rest of the time I can attend the sessions as I like. A nice way to spend 3 days.

Where Are Programming Languages Going

The first session i attended was Anders Hejlberg's keynote speak about his views on the future for programming languages. He started out by giving a small demo of Turbo Pascal, which was the first language he helped create. He gave two reasons for showing the pascal demo. Firstly it is 25 years since it was made and secondly he wanted to show that not much has changed since then. At least not in the way we program today. 25 years ago you programmed using text files, and that method hasn't changed since. Anders's prediction as to how we program in 25 years, is that it will still be as text files.

A Developer's guide To the Microsoft Platform

After the keynote speak, i attended a session showing the possibilities with .NET and C#. During the session the presenter made an application using various new techniques for just about everything. Some of the topics covered was Ling to SQL,Silverlight, WPF and ASP.NET AJAX. Basically it was show how to use <insert Microsoft acronym for fancy stuff here>. But pretty cool though. I find it fascinating how much stuff you can make so easily using the .NET languages and Visual Studio.