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.

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#

I will be speaking at tomorrow’s Code Camp Hartford 2 on the topic of using F# for the Testing and Analysis of existing code. This talk will be composed of much of the same material I used at Code Camp Waltham 11, although I will be preparing additional introductory material as many of my Waltham attendees had no prior exposure to F#. 

I hope the audience will find this new introduction short and sweet.  In this case my goal will not be to teach F# per se, instead I would like to impress upon the audience the power of using functional programming constructs.

 

Presentation Details

F# for Testing and Analytics will be held in Room E-Echo at 10:30am.

As I often like to make changes up to the last minute, this post will be updated with my slides after the presentation. Slides are now available here.

 

The Plan

• Talk Introduction
• Shameless Plug: Upcoming F# User Group Speakers
• Survey the audience
• F# Introduction
• Why F#?
• Some Quick and Elegant Examples contrasted with C#
• F# Testing Toolbox
• xUnit.NET
• TestDriven.NET and NCover
• NaturalSpec
• FsCheck

For more information, see my post on the Code Camp Waltham 11 Presentation.  I wrote quite extensively in that post on most of the things I will be discussing in this talk.

A couple of months ago I was talking to Lou Franco, the head of our Software Engineering department and fellow functional programming enthusiast, about the possibility of using F# for projects in the future.  Being business minded, he replied that he would need a compelling reason to bring F# on board.  This presentation is dedicated to him and others who have functional programming on their radar but haven’t yet found a compelling reason to bring it in to their company.

I acknowledge that, as for now, it’s difficult to suggest anyone do more than play with F#.  I have been anxiously awaiting the stabilization of the F# API which will come along with the release of VS2010.  With the recent changes breaking backwards compatibility, maintaining my old F# samples has become quite a nightmare.  Indeed, not a single code sample I have from a year ago works out of the box with the current release.

However, VS2010 is only a few months away.  Now is the time to start learning about F# and the paradigms which make it so powerful.  Functional programming has amazing benefits in terms of parallelization, code compression and overall code robustness.  

At Code Camp 12 Boston, I will talk about the soon-to-be-realized world where programmers are divided into groups which each use different types of languages to build different kinds of things.  This is easy to predict as it is already occurring.  UI, data processing and data storage programmers are already diversifying both in working knowledge and tools.

As is evidenced by WPF, HTML and CSS it seems UI design is moving more and more to a declarative style.  Similarly, the rise of F#, Scala, Erlang and Haskell indicates that algorithmic programmers are migrating to the functional programming languages.  SQL has long been the language of those involved in data storage.  It’s no wonder that this has happened.  When your tool is better designed for your job, the work gets done faster and you end up with a better result.

Where does this leave imperative and object oriented languages?  Languages like Java, VB and C# will be relegated to being used as “glue” for existing systems while abstract languages slowly eat away their market share.  This will happen more and more as the number of cores per processor continues to increase and those with imperative implementations find that they are unable to scale.

When: Oct 16th, 2009 (11:50am)
Where: 201 Jones Rd, 6th Floor, Waltham MA USA (Room TBC)

Slides are available here.

Also, be sure to also check out my fellow F# User Group leader Talbott Crowell’s talk.  It’s right before mine (10:30) in the same room (Thanks Chris!).  You can find out more by heading over to Chris Bowen’s blog and reading his post on Code Camp 12.

I’ve been working for a while on a new presentation which I was finally able to give last week at the New Hampshire .NET User Group.  F# and You! focuses on painting the big picture about F# instead of the off-putting details like having to learn new syntax.

 

For this new presentation I start by discussing the adoption of functional programming on other platforms by using Scala, Erlang and Haskell as examples.  I then continue on to how the algorithmic programmers are moving to functional languages while UI developers are moving towards declarative.

This then naturally raises the question of why programmers would choose a specific style of programming for a specific task.  The answer, of course, is that when you work close to a domain you can build things more quickly and with a lower error rate.

This then transitions easily into the specific beneficial properties of functional programming (and F#).

 

General Overview:

• The Separation of UI and Back End
• What is Functional Programming? (Functional Concepts)
• Pure functions
• Immutability
• Lambda Expressions
• Higher Order Functions
• Recursion
• The Benefits of Functional Programming
• Code Compression
• Parallelism
• Robustness
• Proof is in the Pudding
• TrueSkill
• Grange Insurance Rating Engine
• MSN adCenter
• Wrap-up

 

I’ve also found that it is useful to show the latest circulating version of the Ant Colony simulation I wrote over a year ago.  I found a version in Don Syme’s JAOO Talk code samples but am not sure who has been keeping it up to date.  A big thanks to whoever that person is.  It provides some sweet eye candy to dull the bitterness of the technical Functional Concepts section.

 

Planned (and Past) “F# and You!” Locations:

11/10/2009 – CT .NET Developers Group (Farmington, CT)
10/28/2009 – Technology Users Group (Charleston, SC)
10/21/2009 – New Hampshire .NET User Group (Nashua, NH)

See the new Other Events section of our F# User Group site for information on other upcoming F# talks.

 

Downloads:

Latest Slides
VS2008 Code Samples