Another great week in F#.  Most importantly, it is now known that the language will continue to be available for free, despite productization.  Also, the F# PowerPack is now available for VS2010 beta and the MSDN documentation is up.

 

Tore Green asks Don Syme “will F# continue to be freely available?”

Free options will continue to exist, most likely through the VS shell. For example, we'll be continuing with our VS2008 plugin until the plans around a VS2010 shell finalize.

It is very good to hear that the productization of F# won’t stop it from continuing to be available for free.

 

Tomas Petricek’s WebCast – Using Asynchronous Workflows

Now that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is out, it is finally a good time to take a look at one of the (in my opinion) most interesting new features in the new release - the F# language.

In this Webcast, Tomas shows how simple it is to add asynchronous operation to an application via the F# asynchronous workflow feature.

 

F# PowerPack Beta 1 for .NET 4.0/Visual Studio 2010 is Available.

F# PowerPack is now available for download for the latest Beta development milestones of the next generation of Microsoft's development platform and tools.

I know a great many people (not to mention myself) were disappointed that the VS 2010 beta did not ship with this.  I for one am in love with it’s Math and Charting features.

 

Visual F# MSDN Documentation

The Visual F# product provides support for developing F# applications or extending other .NET applications with F# code.

We now have official documentation in the MSDN style we all know and love.

 

F# – You can overload operators, but you can’t use them.

^ (op_Concatenate): Compiler error in F#. Apparently only strings can be concatenated.

> (op_GreaterThan): Runtime Error – Failure during generic comparison: the type Program+OppTest4 does not implement the System.IComparable interface.

It’s not what you say but how you say it, and while I feel the reaction of the author was way over the top, his concerns seem justified.  I’m hoping it’s just a bug and, now being identified, will be resolved.

This week we have a fresh video interview with Chris Smith.  This is in addition to some excellent writing on prototyping DSLs, asynchronous workflows, WPF, functional composition and the open/closed principle.

I would also like to note that for the next few weeks I will be off vacationing.  I apologize in advance for any missed or delayed updates.  If you live in Japan and would like to discuss F# or functional programming in general, I would love to meet up with you for tea or a beer.

 

Chris Smith is interviewed on Technology and Friends

Chris Smith is a software design engineer on the Microsoft Visual F# team. In this interview, Chris describes the uses of F# and how it differs from object-oriented languages, such as C# and Visual Basic.

 

Adam Granicz discusses Prototyping DSLs in F#

To build a domain specific language, you need a quick and effective prototyping process that can parse your language syntax and perform semantic checking.

 

Daniel Mohl writes an Asynchronous Directory.GetFiles and File.Copy

The following examples show how it could be solved with F# both synchronously and asynchronously. While this is definitely not production ready, it provides a few samples of how asynchronous workflows can be used in the wild.

 

Steve Horsfield describes programmatic addition of a WPF Data Template to a Resource Dictionary

I have noticed some interest in my earlier post on how to add a WPF data template to a resource dictionary in code and so this post is a demonstration of the technique.  The code is presented in F# but I have deliberately kept the code simple and fairly non-functional so that those of a C# or VB.NET background can follow the process easily.

 

Steve Horsfield explores function composition operators

Following on from my last post, and in preparation for a series on producing a full WPF application in F#, in this post I discuss the differences between the |> and >> operators and some additional functions I find helpful for composing functions.

 

Steffen Forkmann demonstrates the open/closed principle in F#

In object-oriented programming, the open/closed principle states "software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification”

If we follow this principle we get lot’s of small and testable classes. I want to demonstrate this with a simple spam checker for mails.