The videos (slides+audio) from the Microsoft-hosted LANG.Net Symposium are now available. Talks include "Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform", " Ruby on the CLR", "Spec#", and "VB 9". The conference focused on programming languages that target managed execution platforms such as the .NET CLR.
Gilad Bracha covers dynamic invoke and hotswapping features for the JVM. The discussion also covers many of the type checking and overloading issues that face dynamic language implementers.
John Gough discusses some problems with implementing Ruby on the CLR including the lack of a definitive semantic guide, the problems caused by defining classes at runtime, closures, and non-local returns.
Paul Vick covers some possible future directions for VB with an emphasis on returning it to its scripting language roots. Included is an experimental program that runs fragments of VB in the same way you would run SQL fragments in a query analyzer.
Miguel de Icaza from Novel talks about Mono and Linux on the desktop. Miguel covers topics ranging from the early days when death threats were received for implementing a Microsoft spec to the current status of their platform specific GUI frameworks for Linux, Windows, and OSX.