An Interview with Eric Gunnerson

Soon after we [Microsoft] had decided to do a new language, we had to figure out who was going to test it. I had been the test lead for the Visual C++ compiler for about three years and working on a new language seemed to be an interesting challenge. The first thing that my team did was spend a few days reviewing and commenting on the very early C# language specification and based on our C++ experience, the best way to address those was for me to join the C# language design team.

You've been closely involved in the language development of C#. In what manner were you involved in the development of the C# programming language? Are you getting a lot of design requests from the growing C# community?

I spent several years on the C# language design team, along with Anders and three or four other Microsoft people. We probably averaged about five hours a week of design meetings during my time on the team. After we shipped the current version of Visual Studio, I decided to switch from QA to Program Management, and since then I don't have time to attend design meetings any more, but I am still closely involved in what's going on.

Yes, we are seeing a fair number of language feature requests from the C# community.

There are still many companies and development communities out there that don't understand the technology behind .Net and the issues that C# is trying to address. How is .Net and C# being accepted by the computing industry?

I think the acceptance has been fairly good so far, but there's no doubt that .NET is a big change from the way that we've done things previously. The managed environment has huge benefits in the area of robustness and programmer productivity, so over time I expect it to be very successful.

C# now allows for rapid development and at the same time have the power of traditional programming languages such as C/C++, do you see Visual C++, MFC and other related technologies to slowly migrate to C#? If so, what is the timeframe that you and Microsoft are looking at?

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