Muljadi Budiman was the top-rated speaker at the recent St. Louis Day of .NET event, and it’s easy to see why. His presentations are energetic, humorous, and packed with useful information.

At tonight’s St. Louis .NET User Group meeting, he zipped through an overview of Visual Studio 2010 and 4.0 features of C#, VB, WPF, the CLR and the DLR in a little over 90 minutes.

Highlights included:

  • VS2010:
    • multi-monitor support
    • Call Hierarchy visualizer
    • “Navigate To” improvements
    • “Consume-First Development” (greate for TDD)
    • Code Snippets for HTML, ASP.NET and JavaScript
    • Parallel Tasks
    • a WPF designer that doesn’t suck
    • “Embed Interop Types” compiler feature to avoid having to distribute big Interop DLL files
  • VB.NET
    • Auto-implemented properties (catching up to C#) with initial values (C#’s turn to catch up now)
    • Collection initializers (catching up to C#)
    • multi-line lambdas (catching up to C#)
    • getting rid of the underscore line continuation character! (catching up to every language created since 1982 or so)
  • CLR
    • Lazy<T>
    • Generic Set collections
    • Tuples

I don’t know if Mul has had an opportunity to present outside of the St. Louis area, but if you’re organizing a regional code camp or .NET event, I would highly recommend him.

Thanks to Quilogy for providing the geek fuel (pizza & soda) for tonight’s meeting.