While covering TechEd 2003 for us last week, Chad Myers managed to sit down and interview Eric Gunnerson, a Program Manager in the Visual C# .NET group at Microsoft. In the interview, Eric discusses the future of C#, other languages, and more. He was also kind enough to entertain questions from community users such as RMD, eldoen, and more. Here is an excerpt:

ActiveWin.com: What's it like being on the C# language design team? What is a typical design meeting like?

Eric Gunnerson: I've moved off the design team as I've been less involved with the language. The bulk of my involvement came on the 2002 release.

Language design is a huge investment in time, since there are thousands of small details that you have to decide on, even if it's unlikely that any C# programmer will hit that case in a year's time. But it's also hugely rewarding, and working on a new language is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. I'm really only a semi-professional language designer, but I think I was able to offer a useful perspective on the design team. Oh, and I should mention that I got to work on a really great team - Anders, Peter Golde, Scott Wiltamuth, Peter Solich, and Todd Proebsting are all very skilled technically, not to mention being really great people.

Design meetings usually follow one of two models. The first is when we have "special guests" to talk about a specific issue. It could be the SQL team talking about the problems they've encountered trying to write nullable types, or Jim Blinn to talk to us about performance issues in trying to write fast C# graphics code, or somebody from the CLR team to discuss a shared bit of functionality. Those meetings are always fascinating.