At this Saturday’s Code Camp I’ll be giving a brand new presentation on using F#.  The goal of this presentation is to have those attending leave with an idea of what F# can help them achieve today as well as instill a desire to know more.  This post contains my presentation materials as well as links to additional information on the topics covered.

(Slide and code links will be updated soon.)

 

Presentation Details

F# for Testing and Analytics will be held in the TBC (Technical Briefing Center) at 10:30am.

New England Code Camp 11 Information
Download Presentation Slides
Download Real World Example Code Sample

I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately on the best way to get developers excited about F#.  By focusing less on the language’s details and more on what the language can help achieve I hope to impress upon those attending why F# is worth the effort.  The preliminary structure of the talk is as follows::

• Introduction
  • Announcing the New England F# User Group 
• Why F#?
  • Time Savings
  • Readability
  • Code Exploration
  • Robust Software
  • Visual Analytics
• F# Testing Toolbox
  • xUnit.NET
  • TestDriven.NET and NCover
  • NaturalSpec
  • FsCheck
  • FsStory
• A Real World Example
  • Exploring the Problem Space
  • Collect, Analyze, Report
  • Visualizing Data

Presentation Influences
John Hughes’s Paper: Why Functional Programming Matters
John Hughes’s Talk: FP – A Secret Weapon for Software Testing
Matthew Podwysocki’s 7 Part Series: Functional Programming Unit Testing

 

Announcing the New England F# User Group 

I’m proud to announce that we will be holding our first New England F# User Group meeting on Monday April 6th, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.  It will be held at the aptly named Microsoft NERD center.  I hope to see you there.

Visit the F# User Group Homepage for more information.

 

xUnit.NET

“About a year ago it became clear to myself and Brad Wilson that there were some very clear patterns of success (and failure) with the tools we were using for writing tests. Rather than repeating guidance about "do X" or "don't do Y", it seemed like it was the right time to reconsider the framework itself and see if we could codify some of those rules.”

xUnit.NET Homepage

Learn More about xUnit.NET
Matthew Podwysocki’s The Unit Testing Story in F# Revisited
Jim Burger’s Unit testing in F# with xUnit.NET
Harry Pierson’s Practical F# Parsing: Unit Testing

 

TestDriven.NET and NCover

“TestDriven.NET is a zero friction unit testing add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The current release of TestDriven.NET supports multiple unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit and MS Team System and is fully compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.”

TestDriven.NET Homepage (Includes a free version of NCover)
NCover Homepage

Learn More about TestDriven.NET and NCover
Matthew Podwysocki’s F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit = Win 
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 4 – Code Coverage

 

NaturalSpec

“The idea of NaturalSpec is to give domain experts the possibility to express their scenarios directly in compilable Unit Test scenarios by using a Domain-specific language (DSL) for Unit Tests. NaturalSpec is completely written in F# – but you don’t have to learn F# to use it. You don’t even have to learn programming at all.”

NaturalSpec Homepage

Learn More about NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s “Getting Started” with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Testing QuickSort with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Using NaturalSpec to create a spec for C# projects

 

FsCheck

“FsCheck is a tool for testing .NET programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions, methods or objects should satisfy, and FsCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.”

FsCheck Homepage

Learn More about FsCheck
Claudio Cherubino’s Random testing in F# with FsCheck
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 2 – QuickCheck and FsCheck
Kurt Schelfthout’s FsChecking dnAnalytics Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

 

FsStory

“FsStory is a library for writing executable user stories in F#. FsStory enables the developer to write user story scenarios (in Given/When/Then form) in F# code.”

FsStory Homepage

Learn More about FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s Fluent language in FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s FsStory, executable stories in F#

At this Saturday’s Code Camp I’ll be giving a brand new presentation on using F#.  The goal of this presentation is to have those attending leave with an idea of what F# can help them achieve today as well as instill a desire to know more.  This post contains my presentation materials as well as links to additional information on the topics covered.

 

Presentation Details

F# for Testing and Analytics will be held in the TBC (Technical Briefing Center) at 10:30am.

New England Code Camp 11 Information

I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately on the best way to get developers excited about F#.  By focusing less on the language’s details and more on what the language can help achieve I hope to impress upon those attending why F# is worth the effort.  The preliminary structure of the talk is as follows::

• Introduction
  • Announcing the New England F# User Group 
• Why F#?
  • Time Savings
  • Readability
  • Code Exploration
  • Robust Software
  • Power
• F# Testing Toolbox
  • xUnit.NET
  • TestDriven.NET and NCover
  • NaturalSpec
  • FsCheck
• A Real World Example
  • Exploring the Problem Space
  • Collect, Analyze, Report
  • Visualizing Data

Presentation Influences
John Hughes’s Paper: Why Functional Programming Matters
John Hughes’s Talk: FP – A Secret Weapon for Software Testing
Matthew Podwysocki’s 7 Part Series: Functional Programming Unit Testing

 

Announcing the New England F# User Group 

I’m proud to announce that we will be holding our first New England F# User Group meeting on Monday April 6th, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.  It will be held at the aptly named Microsoft NERD center.  I hope to see you there.

Visit the F# User Group Homepage for more information.

 

xUnit.NET

“About a year ago it became clear to myself and Brad Wilson that there were some very clear patterns of success (and failure) with the tools we were using for writing tests. Rather than repeating guidance about "do X" or "don't do Y", it seemed like it was the right time to reconsider the framework itself and see if we could codify some of those rules.”

xUnit.NET Homepage

Learn More about xUnit.NET
Matthew Podwysocki’s The Unit Testing Story in F# Revisited
Jim Burger’s Unit testing in F# with xUnit.NET
Harry Pierson’s Practical F# Parsing: Unit Testing

 

TestDriven.NET and NCover

“TestDriven.NET is a zero friction unit testing add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The current release of TestDriven.NET supports multiple unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit and MS Team System and is fully compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.”

TestDriven.NET Homepage (Includes a free version of NCover)
NCover Homepage

Learn More about TestDriven.NET and NCover
Matthew Podwysocki’s F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit = Win 
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 4 – Code Coverage

 

NaturalSpec

“The idea of NaturalSpec is to give domain experts the possibility to express their scenarios directly in compilable Unit Test scenarios by using a Domain-specific language (DSL) for Unit Tests. NaturalSpec is completely written in F# – but you don’t have to learn F# to use it. You don’t even have to learn programming at all.”

NaturalSpec Homepage

Learn More about NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s “Getting Started” with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Testing QuickSort with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Using NaturalSpec to create a spec for C# projects

 

FsCheck

“FsCheck is a tool for testing .NET programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions, methods or objects should satisfy, and FsCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.”

FsCheck Homepage

Learn More about FsCheck
Claudio Cherubino’s Random testing in F# with FsCheck
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 2 – QuickCheck and FsCheck
Kurt Schelfthout’s FsChecking dnAnalytics Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

 

FsStory

“FsStory is a library for writing executable user stories in F#. FsStory enables the developer to write user story scenarios (in Given/When/Then form) in F# code.”

FsStory Homepage

Learn More about FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s Fluent language in FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s FsStory, executable stories in F#

Over the last six months I’ve given variations on the same F# presentation on six separate occasions.  Each time I’ve gotten a similar response: enthusiasm from a small percentage of the audience and glazed-over stares from the majority.  In retrospect it seems obvious that I’ve been missing one of the major tenets of making great presentations, know thy audience.  It’s time for a new approach.

 

Information Overload

When thinking about how to get people excited about F# I immediately jumped to the learning format that I found the most exciting.  There was no time in my life when I was as overwhelmed by information like I was working on my Computer Science degree at UMass Amherst and I loved every minute of it.  When I started out, it seemed that using a university lecture as a model was the best possible format for sharing this kind of information.

I’ve since come to realize that this style of soaking the audience with “a fire hose of information” is a poor format for Code Camps.  While using this technique, I could see people turning off one by one as they became overloaded with information.  This is not in the spirit of code camp which aims to be a much more laid back kind of experience. 

 

As a FP Ambassador

Let’s invert perspectives and think about what an audience member would want.  When a person comes to a Code Camp presentation, it’s likely to be one of their first times being exposed to the topic being presented.  They don’t want to be taught as if they were in a classroom.  Instead, they want to be exposed to new and exciting information.  If their interest is piqued, they will seek details later.

So, instead of focusing on the details of F#, this new presentation will be built around the goal of instilling five key ideas to the audience:

• F# will save you time
• F# will help you become a better programmer
• F# is beautiful
• Immutability is next to godliness
• You can start using F# right now

It must be understood that almost every Code Camp attendee will have had little or no exposure to functional programming.  To many attendees, to be presenting on F# is to be an ambassador from the strange and nebulous functional programming world.  Instead of building walls of information, the goal should be to instead focus on connecting with the audience on the benefits of functional programming.

 

Planned Talk Structure

• Depending on an Audience Poll, Broad Concepts
• Testing with F#
• nUnit Examples (as a baseline)
• xUnit Examples
• FsStory Examples
• Analysis with F# (A Real Example From Atalasoft)
• Using The F# Interactive Window To Build Tests
• Data Collection
• Visualizing Data
• Conclusion
• Why F#?

More details will follow soon.

I've been working on a project in my spare time for a presentation I am going to give at Atalasoft this next friday. I am going to try to recreate Rich Hickey's Clojure ant colony simulation except in F#.

I have run into a number of issues along the way...

First of all, by default F# has no Software Transactional Memory. There is a non-integrated library for it, but i'm not sure I want to step outside of normal F# territory for this demonstration. I think I may just lock on the map nodes while an ant is moving or getting food instead. Although this may not demonstrate highly concurrent functional programming as well.

Secondly, at this point I think I have a good feeling for how to write small code blocks in F#. What I am struggling most with is program structure and message passing. My UMass Scheme course didn't really educate beyond how to write scheme in scheme and none of my traditional object oriented techniques are in play here. The best I can do is try to mimic existing programs.

Third, I'm not very familiar with the windows drawing calls. I'm not too worried about this though, there are tons of examples out there. The hardest part will be shoe-horning them into F#'s functional style.

-Rick

Over the last six months I’ve given variations on the same F# presentation on six separate occasions.  Each time I’ve gotten a similar response: enthusiasm from a small percentage of the audience and glazed-over stares from the majority.  In retrospect it seems obvious that I’ve been missing one of the major tenets of making great presentations, know thy audience.  It’s time for a new approach.

 

Information Overload

When thinking about how to get people excited about F# I immediately jumped to the learning format that I found the most exciting.  There was no time in my life when I was as overwhelmed by information like I was working on my Computer Science degree at UMass Amherst and I loved every minute of it.  When I started out, it seemed that using a university lecture as a model was the best possible format for sharing this kind of information.

I’ve since come to realize that this style of soaking the audience with “a fire hose of information” is a poor format for Code Camps.  While using this technique, I could see people turning off one by one as they became overloaded with information.  This is not in the spirit of code camp which aims to be a much more laid back kind of experience. 

 

As a FP Ambassador

Let’s invert perspectives and think about what an audience member would want.  When a person comes to a Code Camp presentation, it’s likely to be one of their first times being exposed to the topic being presented.  They don’t want to be taught as if they were in a classroom.  Instead, they want to be exposed to new and exciting information.  If their interest is piqued, they will seek details later.

So, instead of focusing on the details of F#, this new presentation will be built around the goal of instilling five key ideas to the audience:

• F# will save you time
• F# will help you become a better programmer
• F# is beautiful
• Immutability is next to godliness
• You can start using F# right now

It must be understood that almost every Code Camp attendee will have had little or no exposure to functional programming.  To many attendees, to be presenting on F# is to be an ambassador from the strange and nebulous functional programming world.  Instead of building walls of information, the goal should be to instead focus on connecting with the audience on the benefits of functional programming.

 

Planned Talk Structure

• Depending on an Audience Poll, Broad Concepts
• Testing with F#
• nUnit Examples (as a baseline)
• xUnit Examples
• FsStory Examples
• Analysis with F# (A Real Example From Atalasoft)
• Using The F# Interactive Window To Build Tests
• Data Collection
• Visualizing Data
• Conclusion
• Why F#?

More details will follow soon.

At this Saturday’s Code Camp I’ll be giving a brand new presentation on using F#.  The goal of this presentation is to have those attending leave with an idea of what F# can help them achieve today as well as instill a desire to know more.  This post contains my presentation materials as well as links to additional information on the topics covered.

 

Presentation Details

F# for Testing and Analytics will be held in the TBC (Technical Briefing Center) at 10:30am.

New England Code Camp 11 Information

I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately on the best way to get developers excited about F#.  By focusing less on the language’s details and more on what the language can help achieve I hope to impress upon those attending why F# is worth the effort.  The preliminary structure of the talk is as follows::

• Introduction
  • Announcing the New England F# User Group 
• Why F#?
  • Time Savings
  • Readability
  • Code Exploration
  • Robust Software
  • Power
• F# Testing Toolbox
  • xUnit.NET
  • TestDriven.NET and NCover
  • NaturalSpec
  • FsCheck
• A Real World Example
  • Exploring the Problem Space
  • Collect, Analyze, Report
  • Visualizing Data

Presentation Influences
John Hughes’s Paper: Why Functional Programming Matters
John Hughes’s Talk: FP – A Secret Weapon for Software Testing
Matthew Podwysocki’s 7 Part Series: Functional Programming Unit Testing

 

Announcing the New England F# User Group 

I’m proud to announce that we will be holding our first New England F# User Group meeting on Monday April 6th, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.  It will be held at the aptly named Microsoft NERD center.  I hope to see you there.

Visit the F# User Group Homepage for more information.

 

xUnit.NET

“About a year ago it became clear to myself and Brad Wilson that there were some very clear patterns of success (and failure) with the tools we were using for writing tests. Rather than repeating guidance about "do X" or "don't do Y", it seemed like it was the right time to reconsider the framework itself and see if we could codify some of those rules.”

xUnit.NET Homepage

Learn More about xUnit.NET
Matthew Podwysocki’s The Unit Testing Story in F# Revisited
Jim Burger’s Unit testing in F# with xUnit.NET
Harry Pierson’s Practical F# Parsing: Unit Testing

 

TestDriven.NET and NCover

“TestDriven.NET is a zero friction unit testing add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The current release of TestDriven.NET supports multiple unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit and MS Team System and is fully compatible with all versions of the .NET Framework.”

TestDriven.NET Homepage (Includes a free version of NCover)
NCover Homepage

Learn More about TestDriven.NET and NCover
Matthew Podwysocki’s F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit = Win 
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 4 – Code Coverage

 

NaturalSpec

“The idea of NaturalSpec is to give domain experts the possibility to express their scenarios directly in compilable Unit Test scenarios by using a Domain-specific language (DSL) for Unit Tests. NaturalSpec is completely written in F# – but you don’t have to learn F# to use it. You don’t even have to learn programming at all.”

NaturalSpec Homepage

Learn More about NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s “Getting Started” with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Testing QuickSort with NaturalSpec
Steffen Forkmann’s Using NaturalSpec to create a spec for C# projects

 

FsCheck

“FsCheck is a tool for testing .NET programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions, methods or objects should satisfy, and FsCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.”

FsCheck Homepage

Learn More about FsCheck
Claudio Cherubino’s Random testing in F# with FsCheck
Matthew Podwysocki’s FP Unit Testing Part 2 – QuickCheck and FsCheck
Kurt Schelfthout’s FsChecking dnAnalytics Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

 

FsStory

“FsStory is a library for writing executable user stories in F#. FsStory enables the developer to write user story scenarios (in Given/When/Then form) in F# code.”

FsStory Homepage

Learn More about FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s Fluent language in FsStory
Gustaf Nilsson Kotte’s FsStory, executable stories in F#

F# events are popping up all over the place and so I’ve included a separate section for them today.  As far as posts go I’ve stumbled across immutable queue and range libraries,  a post on the underlying implementation of discriminated unions, using the reactive framework and finally, a Microsoft research project: F7 Refinement Types.

 

-- Events --

Talbott Crowell is Presenting at the New England Visual Basic Professionals, November 5th

• Introducing F# at 6:15pm

 

I am Presenting at Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp 2009 on November 7th

• Why F# at 11:15am in Track 2
• F# for Testing and Analysis at 2:40pm in Track 4

 

NashDotNet - F# Firestarter in Franklin, TN on November 14th

Come with an open mind and a laptop. Be prepared to learn, share, and chat. No prior knowledge or experience with F# is expected.

 

 

-- Posts --

Julien’s An Immutable Range Library in F# 

An immutable range library in F# where a range is only defined by a minimum and a maximum value (hence, there is no step).

and Julien’s An immutable Queue Library in F#

An immutable queue library in F#. The queue is divided into two lists : one for dequeueing, and one for enqueueing. All operations are based on the List module.

I hope that Julien considers contributing these gems to the F# Power Pack.

 

F7: Refinement Types for F#

F7 is an enhanced type checker for the F# programming language. F7 supports static checking of properties expressed with refinement types. Our motivation is to check various security properties of F# implementation code by typing.

I took a peek at the included samples and found myself quite lost.  It would be great if a walkthrough on how to use F7 were to pop up.

 

Using F# Discriminated Unions in C# (VS2010 Beta 2)

While updating my VsVim editor extensions for Beta2 [1] I got hit by a change in the way F# exposed discriminated unions in metadata.

A quick romp through how discriminated unions work under the hood and how you use them from C#.

 

IObservable/IObserver – Using the Reactive Framework with F#

One of the nice new features in .NET 4.0 beta 2 is the IObservable<T>/IObserver<T> support from the Reactive Framework (“Rx Framework” or sometimes “LinqToEvents”). It is a really powerful way to use reactive programming in .NET and especially in F# developed by Erik Meijer and his team.

Ben Fry, the creator of Processing and the author of Visualizing Data is coming to speak in Northampton. The event is sponsored by Atalasoft and Snowtide.

When: May 5th @ 6:30
Where: Snowtide Offices, 243 King St (Potpourri Mall, just across from Stop and Shop) Northampton, MA

I'll post more details soon.

I posted my Engineering the Evaluation Funnel Pecha Kucha at my Atalasoft blog.

Had a lot of fun with my Business of Software Pecha Kucha. My topic was Engineering the Evaluation Funnel, or how companies that have downloaded evaluations can still track usage with being creepy and sending back information from the application.

I'm going to be recording a version of my presentation and posting it soon.