C# in Depth

358 CHAPTER 13 Elegant code in the new eraof smaller ones that can run at the same time, after all, and delegates are nice buildingblocks for that. The support for delegates in the form of lambda expressions—andeven expression trees to express logic in a more data-like manner—will certainly helpparallelization efforts in the future.There will be more advances to come. Some improvements may come throughnew frameworks such as Parallel Extensions, while others may come through futurelanguage features. Some of the frameworks may use existing language features innovel ways, just as the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime uses iterator blocks aswe saw in chapter 6.One area we may well see becoming more prominent is provability. Concurrency isa murky area full of hidden pitfalls, and it’s also very hard to test properly. Testingevery possibility is effectively impossible—but in some cases source code can be analyzedfor concurrency correctness automatically. Making this applicable to businesssoftware at a level that is usable by “normal” developers such as ourselves is likely to bechallenging, but we may see progress as it becomes increasingly important to use thelarge number of cores becoming available to us.There are clearly dozens of areas I could have picked that could become crucial inthe next decade—mobile computing, service-oriented architectures (SOA), humancomputer interfaces, rich Internet applications, system interoperability, and so forth.These are all likely to be transformed significantly—but parallel computing is likely tobe at the heart of many of them. If you don’t know much about threading, I stronglyadvise you to start learning right now.13.5 FarewellSo, that’s C#—for now. I doubt that it will stay at version 3 forever, although I would personallylike Microsoft to give us at least a few years of exploring and becoming comfortablewith C# 3 before moving the world on again. I don’t know about you, but I coulddo with a bit of time to use what we’ve got instead of learning the next version. If weneed a bit more variety and spice, there are always other languages to be studied…In the meantime, there will certainly be new libraries and architectures to come togrips with. Developers can never afford to stand still—but hopefully this book hasgiven you a rock-solid foundation in C#, enabling you to learn new technologies withoutworrying about what the language is doing.There’s more to life than learning about the new tools available, and while you mayhave bought this book purely out of intellectual curiosity, it’s more likely that you justwant to get the most out of C# 3. After all, there’s relatively little point in acquiring a skillif you’re not going to use it. C# 3 is a wonderful language, and .NET 3.5 is a great platform—buton their own they mean very little. They need to be used to provide value.I’ve tried to give you a thorough understanding of C# 3, but that doesn’t mean thatyou’ve seen all that it can do, any more than playing each note on a piano in turnmeans you’ve heard every possible tune. I’ve put the features in context and givensome examples of where you might find them helpful. I can’t tell you exactly whatground-breaking use you might find for C# 3—but I wish you the very best of luck.Licensed to Rhona Hadida