Cω programming language and database/XML applications
I found this article on MSDN about a new programming language called Cω (C-omega) that was quite interesting. It is a language created by Microsoft Research that looks a lot like C# but has new constructs that help programmers to access and process XML and relational data. Some of the cool features that grabbed my attention were special streams type, XPath and SQL like querying capability and anonymous structures for semi-structured data. You can find out more about this cool new language on the research group homepage. They also have a shared-source preview compiler which I'm going to experiment with soon. Will post more about this later.