It’s been about 11 months since the last Lang.NET Symposium and we’ve been working on next year’s version. But then we discovered that we’re not the only ones inside Microsoft thinking about having a language conference. A couple of meetings later, and we’ve decided to combine them, which will assuredly lead to side conversations like this:

DSL DevCon Attendee: Hey, you got your compiler in my DSL!

Lang.NET Attendee: Hey, you got your DSL in my compiler!

[They sample the combined content]

Both Attendees: Mmmm, two great conferences that work well together!

Well, maybe not. But seriously, it should be a great combined conference.

However, there are some logistics things we need to work out, like how many days should the combined conference run? We figure the “right” answer to these questions depends on the likely overlap between the two conferences. Frankly, we don’t know what the overlap will be so we decided to simply, you know, ask.

If you are interested in attending Lang.NET, the DSL DevCon, or both next year, please head over to Chris Sells blog and make your voice heard.

The PDC folks pushed out a bunch of new sessions yesterday, including a bunch from my part of DevDiv. You can see the full list of sessions that have been published (so far) at the PDC site.

An Introduction to F#
Learn about Microsoft’s new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework. F# combines functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, tools, and object model of .Net. Understand how F# asynchronous workflows help tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET.

Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in .NET
The CLR has great support for dynamic languages like IronPython. Learn how the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a shared dynamic type system, a standard hosting model, and support for generating fast dynamic code. Hear how these features enable languages that use the DLR to share code with other dynamic and static languages like VB.NET and C#.

Future Directions for Visual Basic
Come learn about the new capabilities in the next version of the language, including: extensions to LINQ, syntax simplifications, and improvements to the IDE. We’ll provide insight into the direction of the language, including dynamic binding, meta-programming, and scripting.

The Future of C#
In this talk Microsoft Technical fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg outlines the future of C#. He will describe the many forces that influence and shape the future of programming languages and explain how they fit into C#.

Visual C++: 10 is the New 6
Get more done. The next version of Visual C++ is all about improving developer productivity for large-scale applications. Learn about the IntelliSense and browsing experiences, changes to the project and build system, project-less browsing, collaboration through remote symbol indexing, and custom visualization of symbolic information.

• My hockey team won last night 4-2. No points for me, but I was even on the night. I did spend some time in the penalty box, but I was serving a two many men on the ice bench minor. We only had nine skaters, not enough for two full lines, so I’m pretty tired today. However, I’m not as tired as I was two weeks ago – that’s a good sign.
• Politics 2.0 watch: The Obama campain announced yesterday that they raised $55 million in donations in the month of February. That’s significantly more than Clinton ($35 million) and McCain ($12 million) combined. Even more impressive is that $45 million of that was raised online, of which $40 million were from donations of $100 or less and $22.5 million were from donations of $25 or less. I guess in Politics 2.0, individuals contribute more than online punditry and video parodies of political commercials.
• TextGlow is a Sivlerlight 2 based Word docx file viewer, created by James Newton-King. Nice, but what I really want is “SlideGlow”, a SL2 based PPTX file viewer. (via DNK)
• Speaking of Silverlight, Windows Live launched an experimental site called PhotoZoom which will let you create DeepZoom photo albums. (via LiveSide)
• Charlie Calvert has created a home for Language Futures discussion on MSDN Code Gallery. If you’ll recall, back in January he asked for input on Dynamic Lookup. Now he’s looking for feedback on Call Hierarchy, a proposed VS IDE feature to help you visualize how your code flows. Great idea, but the Call Hierarchy dialog mockup isn’t very intuitive. Couldn’t we put these visualizations into the code editor window directly, like CodeRush does?
• John Lam continues his Dynamic Silverlight series, first building a Flickr image browser in Managed JScript then showing how to integrate an IronRuby version of the Flickr image browser with an ASP.NET MVC app.
• EdJez is inspiring. Subscribed. (via Brad Wilson)

• Big news yesterday was Microsoft announcing “Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability“. More details available at the new Interoperability website and this interview with Bob Muglia.
• The videos from Lang.NET 2008 are now available, including mine.
• Mix08 is just under two weeks away, and the news is ramping up. Scott Guthrie provides a “first look” at the Silverlight 2.0 beta (aka the one with .NET) that will release @ Mix. He also provides a set of eight tutorials where he demonstrates building a Digg client for Silverlight 2.0. I’ve been doing a little Silverlight 1.0 experimentation recently, but I think I’m going to scrap it in favor of waiting for 2.0.
• Shorter Nick Malik: IoC is cool, but isn’t a silver bullet. Go read the whole thing.
• Brad Wilson has a new laptop with a solid-state hard drive. VS08 installs in under 10 minutes? I gotta get me one of those…
• In addition to the XNA news, Microsoft also announced Gears of War 2, Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden II and Too Human will all be available this year exclusively on Xbox 360. Of those, I’m most interested in Fable 2, though Too Human is looking interesting. But what about Halo Wars? When is that shipping?

• After spending most of the last four days away from my desk, I was planning on a quiet day to catch up on a variety of things. Then I heard the oh-so-minor news that Microsoft is offering to buy Yahoo for almost $45 billion. Hasn’t been much reaction on the dev, architecture, politics and hockey-oriented blogs I read, but you can get a ton of reactions on TechMeme.
• Lost is back. Finally. I stayed up late last night reading Lostpedia, catching up on Lost Missing Pieces and the Find 815 ARG.
• Alex The Great had four goals and an assist in last night’s victory. Coughing up three goal lead and letting the Canadiens tie the game in the last 30 seconds isn’t encouraging, but a win is a win. The Caps are currently one game behind the SE leading Hurricanes and two games behind the current eight seed Rangers. Alex was named first star for January.
• Ted Neward has a nice summary of Lang.NET by day: one, two and three. I wonder if my talk qualifies for the exception to Ted’s rule that “A blog is not a part of your presentation, and your presentation is not part of your blog”. I had 15 minutes to discuss something I’ve written about over ten posts  (so far).
• John Lam points to the latest DLR hosting spec. I’m much more interested in the DLR code generator, but at least the hosting interface is documented.
• Scott Hanselman has a nice post on fluent interfaces. Note to self, find out if Beautiful Soup works with IronPython.
• I wonder if the VS Source Code Outliner PowerToy works with F#? (via Sam Gentile)
• Chris Tavares has an extensive post Deconstructing ObjectBuilder? I’ve poked around inside OB before, but I’m really looking forward to Unity (also via Sam Gentile)
• NVIDIA finally updated the drivers for the video card in my Tecra M4. That only took a year.