As the Microsoft Lang.NET Symposium went into Day 2, the parade of languages and language combos continued. First out of the blocks was Eric Meijer with a discussion of Volta.

Volta uses a shared programming model to allow ‘’declarative tier-splitting, ‘’ thus parsing apps into tiered-partitions. Volta has been described as a recompiler that works on MSIL rather than on a textual source language, rewriting MSIL into another target language, such as JavaScript. The Volta tools come out of work in Microsoft Research, but are available as downloads from Microsoft Live Labs.

According to Lang.NET Symposium attendee and .NET Languages blogger Jason Bock, Meijer showed a demo of Volta using VB at the event. Meijer wrote a VB client app that was translated into Javascript. Writes Bock: “Asynchronous programming is also mapped in Volta. [Meijer] showed that Volta has end-to-end profiling, which was really impressive.”

Visual Basic meister Paul Vick talked at the symposium about VB, naturally, and the idea of returning scripting to Visual Basic. According to Ted Neward, Vick said the next goal of Visual Basic was to provide the complete range of core/compiler, project and IDE services for people who want to use VB as a scripting engine. Vick demonstrated a simple WinForms app that hosted a single control that exposed the VB editor.

The odd thing is that Visual Basic seemed to take a detour to static approaches and objects just when much of the programmer community was going into reverse, heading away from C++ and Java and toward Ruby. With its appearance as part of the program at Lang.NET, it can be looked at anew.

Here is a sampling of the inimitable Ted Neward, riffing on the Visual Basic struggling under the yoke of the Gods of Computer Science:

I don’t know what Visual Basic did to anger the Gods of Computer Science, but think about it for a second: they were a dynamic language that ran on a bytecode-based platform, used dynamic typing and late name-based binding by default, provided a “scripting glue” to existing applications (Office being the big one), focused primarily on productivity, and followed a component model from almost the first release. Then, after languishing for years as the skinny guy on the beach as the C++ developers kicked sand on their blanket, they get the static-typing and early-binding religion, just in time to be the skinny guy on the beach as the Ruby developers kick sand on their blanket.

Among others appearing on Day 2 was Tomas Petricek, developer lead for the Phalanger PHP language compiler for .NET. Petricek in the past has shown PHP working on Silverlight, and he is said to be moving toward a partial port of Phalanger PHP to the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).

Visual Studio 2008 is now available the old-fashioned way — through retail and volume licensing. The new IDE has been available to MSDN subscribers for a good two months now, and MSDN availability has expanded as well.

Microsoft’s US ISV Developer Evangelism team has a blog post about the announcement. The post also reminds readers of Visual Studio 2008’s new features and provides links to a bunch of relevant resources.

If you haven’t given Visual Studio 2008 a spin yet but intend to do so, then here are two things you may want to check out:

• Earlier this week Microsoft made available a Visual Studio 2008 product comparison data sheet, which is available as a Word doc, a PDF file or an XPS file. This will help you see what each version includes and excludes.
• Once you’ve decided which version is right for you, you can grab a free 90-day trial download of Visual Studio 2008. (Don’t forget about the free-in-perpetuity Visual Studio 2008 Express editions.)

Of course, as The Register points out, the Visual Studio 2008 release, coupled with the recent SQL Server 2008 delay, means that the upcoming Microsoft launch event in Los Angeles is even less important than originally intended — which is not at all to say that the VS team should be chided for getting the retail version out a month ahead of the launch event.

Microsoft MVP Roy Osherove is at work on a book about the art of unit testing. It is interesting to read his site as his thinking evolves and his book moves to completion.

For an example, see a recent post concerning unit testing semantics and syntax. Osherove says he sees a trend that accompanies greater use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), in which developers create more readable syntaxes for tests and specifications.

Osherove asks for input and notes that consistent naming conventions for unit tests are still something people are striving to achieve. Learning and relearning test-related languages seems to come with the territory. What do you think?

Microsoft’s Lang.NET Symposium 2008 got up and running yesterday. C# father Anders Hejlsberg talked about C# 3.0 features, IronPython guru Hugunin discussed the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and IronPython, and Pratap Lakshman from the JScript team talked about the new managed implementation of JScript, codenamed Managed JScript.

Hejlsberg, as reported by blogger extraordinaire Ted Neward, told the assembled language heads that the conventional divisions of language types (into categories) covering the functional, the object-oriented, and so on will break down in the years ahead.

IronPython high priest Jim Hugunin did a demo that mixed Microsoft Robotics Studio code with IronPython running on the DLR. Hugunin’s creation, IronPython, was recently updated as IronPython RC 1.1.1 on CodePlex.  Hugunin created Jython, a Java version of Python.

IronPython 1.0 was debuted in September 2006. The latest release candidate is described as a minor update focused on bug fixing. Hugunin’s team has fielded IronPython 2.0 Alpha 1, as well. This is the first release of IronPython built on the DLR, and targeting version 2.5 of Python.

For his part, Pratap Lakshman provided an overview of the managed Jscript implementation originally discussed at MIX07.  JavaScript on top of the DLR became a reality as part of Silverlight 2.0 (then known as Silverlight 1.1).

Surprise guests at the symposium were Java specialists John Rose and Charles Nutter, who discussed Java’s increasing support of new languages on the JVM.

Planned Day 2 discussions at Lang.NET 2008 include Eric Meijer on Volta, Paul Vick on Visual Basic and Karl Prosser ‘’Powershell Plus. ‘’

The jump from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 was a pretty significant one, as it involved changes such as new APIs and a new version of the CLR.

Why bring this up now? One, we know there are a lot of .NET 1.1 applications out there, so any programmers looking to migrate those applications will want to know which APIs made it into .NET 2.0 and which did not. Two, .NET 3.0 and 3.5 use the same APIs and the same CLR — remember, those upgrades focus primarily on new libraries and new programming language features like LINQ.

To that end Indian blogger cabhilash recently pointed folks to two rather helpful MSDN documents covering that which is obsolete in the .NET Framework 2.0.

The documents are .NET Framework V2.0 Obsolete Type/Member List (By Assembly) and .NET Framework V2.0 Obsolete Type/Member List (By Namespace). For each member or type, Microsoft provides a sentence or two explaining why it should not be used. There tend to be two general reasons for obsolescence — depreciation in Visual Studio 2005 or, simply, a better way of doing things in VS 2005. Either way, the lists are worth a look-see.