I finished my first article since I switching jobs this weekend. It's tentatively titled Integrating XML into Popular Programming Languages: An Overview of Cω and should show up on both XML.com and my Extreme XML column on MSDN at the end of the month. I had initially planned to do the overview of Cω(C-Omega) for MSDN and do a combined article about ECMAScript for XML (E4X) & Cω for XML.com but it turned out that just an article on Cω was already fairly long. My plan is to follow up with an E4X piece in a couple of months. For the geeks in the audience who are a little curious as to exactly what the heck Cω is, here's an introduction to one of the sections of the article to whet your appetite.

The Cω Type System

The goal of the Cω type system is to bridge the gap between Relational, Object and XML data access by creating a type system that is a combination of all three data models. Instead of adding built-in XML or relation types to the C# language, the approach favored by the Cω type system has been to add certain general changes to the C# type system that make it more conducive for programming against both structured relational data and semi structured XML data.

A number of the changes to C# made in Cω make it more conducive for programming against strongly typed XML, specifically XML constrained using W3C XML Schema. Several concepts from XML and XML Schema have analogous features in Cω. Concepts such as document order, the distinction between elements and attributes, having multiple fields with the same name but different values, and content models that specify a choice of types for a given field exist in Cω. A number of these concepts are handled in traditional Object<->XML mapping technologies but it is often with awkwardness. Cω aims at makes programming against strongly typed XML as natural as programming against arrays or strings in traditional programming languages.

I got a lot of good feedback on the article from a couple of excellent reviewers including the father of the X#/Xen himself, Erik Meijer. For those not in the know, X#/Xen was merged with Polyphonic C# to create Cω. Almost all of my article focuses on the aspects of Cω inherited from X#/Xen.