I wanted to let people know that an (almost) final VB 9.0 language specification has been posted on the download center. The spec is missing some copy-edits from the documentation folks, but is otherwise complete. Since I’m not going to get a chance to incorporate the copy-edits until I am back from vacation in January, I wanted to get the spec out there for anyone interested in documentation of the XML features that weren’t present in the previous version of the spec. (I apologize for the lateness of this vis-a-vis the release of the product itself, it’s been a busy fall.)

This updated language specification corresponds to Visual Studio 2008 and covers the following major new features:


  • Friend assemblies (InternalsVisibleTo)
  • Relaxed delegates
  • Local type inferencing
  • Anonymous types
  • Extension methods
  • Nullable types
  • Ternary operator
  • Query expressions
  • Object initializers
  • Expression trees
  • Lambda expressions
  • Generic type inferencing
  • Partial methods
  • XML Members
  • XML Literals
  • XML Namespaces

Questions, comments or criticisms can be sent to basic@microsoft.com. Thanks!