Introductory slide. Colleagues forced me to include the askjonskeet.com link.

.NET isn't Open Source. You can debug through a lot of the source code for the framework if you agree to a "reference licence", but it's not quite the same thing.

.NET isn't Open Source, but the DLR is. And IronRuby. And IronPython. Yay!

And of course Mono is Open Source: the DLR and Mono play nicely together, and the Mono team is hoping to implement the new C# 4.0 features for the 2.8 release in roughly the same timeframe as Microsoft.

This is what .NET 4.0 will look like. The DLR will be included in it, despite being open source. IronRuby and IronPython aren't included, but depend heavily on the DLR. (Currently available versions allow you to use a "standalone" DLR or the one in .NET 4.0b1.)

C# doesn't really depend on the DLR except for its handling of dynamic. C# is a statically typed language, but C# 4.0 has a new static type called dynamic which you can do just about anything with. (This got a laugh, despite being a simple and mostly accurate summary of the dynamic typing support in C# 4.0.)

The fundamental point of the DLR is to handle call sites - decide what to do dynamically with little bits of code. Oh, and do it quickly. That's what the caches are for. They're really clever - particularly the L0 cache which compiles rules (about the context in which a particular decision is valid) into IL via dynamic methods. Awesome stuff.

I'm sure the DLR does many other snazzy things, but this feels like it's the core part of it.

At execution time, the relevant binder is used to work out what a call site should actually do. Unless, that is, the call has a target which implements the shadowy IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface (winner of "biggest mouthful of a type name" prize, 2009) - in which case, the object is asked to handle the call. Who knows what it will do?

Beautifully syntax-highlighted C# 4.0 source code showing the dynamic type in action. The method calls on lines 2 and 3 are both dynamic, even though in the latter case it's just using a static method. Which overload will it pick? It all depends on the type of the actual value at execution time.

If I'd had more time, I'd have demonstrated how the C# compiler preserves the static type information it knows at compile time for the execution time binder to use. This is very cool, but would take far too long to demonstrate in this talk - especially to a bunch of non-C# developers.