Firstable, before I am going to write the following words, I want to mention and admit that I am realy a big fan of Microsoft technologies, its innovetions and its line of philosophy; Most of the time they are doing good job (in some cases I would implement some things in other way, but this issue if for other post...).

What I want to talk about in this post is the C# language's development from the first version of .NET until the further to come which is .NET 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008.
In the beginning of .NET 2.0 there were great and major language improvement, like generics, anonymous methods/delegates and more nice things (that indeed, helps us to write more nice, agile and elegant code). BUT major things often require new keywords to support the 'enhanced' language, for an example: the <TEntity> syntax in order to use and implement generics.

In the generics case, this syntax is required in order to make a usage with this great feature, but in most cases new keywords are BAD, just bad because developers have the annoying habit of using non-keywords as identifiers. An example for new keyword is the pair: return yield. In the first version of iterators, you had to use yield when you wanted to "return" an iterator value back, and as we know everything worked just fine, so why should they need to add the return keyword in order to return the iterator's value? (I'll be glad to get the answer if you got it...)

I tried to figure out and see what Microsoft tried to do regarding this issue and found that they ment to provide a utility that you could run over your source code, and it would replace any identifier that had become a keyword with the escaped version. It should do this by putting an "@" sign in front of it. I don't think that tool at least was published...

Today, just before .NET 3.5 is releases out (not in beta of course), we can see on beta versions and examples the new keywords and innovations that had been added to the language which demands from us to adjust ourselves to the new syntax.

At the bottom line, it makes us a little bit of hard time at the begining, but it enhances our language and gives us a learning challenge and the ability of upgrading our code (maybe not easy to read on the first time but easy to implement and to make it more agile and generic). 

I encourages these changes, but don't forget - everything could work just fine without these new stuff.