Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains can have profound differences in semantics, data types and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. Alex Turner, C# Compiler Program Manager, explains how Visual Studio 2008 aims to unify the programming models through LINQ capabilities in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework and an innovative Application Programming Interface (API) for manipulating and querying XML.

Alex Turner is the Program Manager for the C# Compiler at Microsoft, where he makes sure that C#’s new language features and compiler services become a reality. Alex graduated with an MS in Computer Science from Stony Brook University and interned twice at Microsoft before joining the C# team full-time.