An almost overwhelming number of posts this week with topics including the Skills Matter Programming Exchange, LAgent, data structures, service oriented architecture, monads, infinite sequences, timing F# functions, functional design, and much more.  Come in and check it out.

 

Don Syme on WebSharper: F#-based Rich Client/Server Web Applications

Intellifactory seem to have set about answering the question of "just how simple, clean and productive can you make developing rich web applications that target Javascript?" (my words, not theirs).  While still in beta, signs are that Intellifactory are putting together an impressive technology that makes really good use of F#'s unique facilities to simplify this class of applications.

 

Mike Hadlow on the Skills Matter Functional Programming Exchange

I had a great time today at the Functional Programming Exchange organised by Robert Pickering and Skills Matter. Robert managed to grab some really interesting speakers who gave a nice snapshot of the current art and use of FP.

 

Luca Bolognese on LAgent: an agent framework in F# – Part X – ActiveObject

So you start thinking if there is a way to enhance vanilla objects to make them agents. You want to reuse all the concepts that you are familiar with (i.e. inheritance, visibility rules, etc…) and you want your clients to call agents as if they were calling normal objects. Obviously, under the cover, the method calls won’t execute immediately, but they would be queued.

 

Ted Neward’s A New Kind of Service

Why study new and different programming languages? To change your programming mindset. Not sure what I mean by that? Check this out.

 

Anton Tayanovskyy on Generic Workflow Builders (Monads) in F#

This blog post is about a quick and dirty encoding of Haskell type classes in F#. With the ongoing work on the WebSharper™ project, we are currently very interested in coaxing the .NET type system to support writing code that is generalized over monads and applicative functors.

 

Anton Tayanovskyy on Foldr or FoldBack on Infinite F# Sequences

A noticeable omission in F# standard library is Seq.foldBack, or the famous Haskell foldr. The semantics of foldr is very simple to remember: it replaces the native cons and nil of a list with arbitrary computations.

 

Anton Tayanovskyy on The Execution Speed of Early vs Late Binding

This little post documents one of my little experiments with F#, as I am educating myself on the .NET Framework fundamentals.

This post is also interesting because it describes how to turn on timing in F# interactive.

 

Julien Ortin’s Purely Functional Data Structures in F#: Batched Queue, Binomal Heap and Red-black Set

This post describes the F# implementation of the <insert data structure here> from Chris Okasaki’s “Purely functional data structures”.

 

Justin Lee’s Infer.NET – Now with F# Support

Infer.NET is a framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models. You can use it to solve many different kinds of machine learning problems, from standard problems like classification or clustering through to customised solutions to domain-specific problems.

 

Joh’s Inheritance Nightmares

At this point, readers interested in F# and functional programming languages might wonder what all this has got to do with F#. I think that the common mix of mutability and inheritance is not a very strong basis for good software design. I never really realized that until I took a look at functional programming and immutability.

 

Talbott Crowell’s Slides from Parallel and Concurrent Programming with F#

As promised, please find the slides and source code for the demos.

 

Ryan Riley Discusses F# on the HighOnCoding Podcast

Last week I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Ryan Riley about F# programming language. Ryan discussed different features of the F# language and how it can be used to build applications.

 

Cameron Taggart’s F# on Mac using Cocoa

Laurent Etiemble created a Monobjc project/library that allows access to Objective-C frameworks and libraries like Cocoa.  I just ported the first tutorial to F#.  I’m able to build it on my PC and run it on my Mac.

 

Mark Needham’s Haskell vs F#: Function Composition

I'm reading through John Hughes' 'Why functional programming matters' paper and one thing I've come across which is a bit counter intuitive to me is the Haskell function composition operator.

 

Marius Bancila’s F# Operations on List

In this post I want to show how you can implement common list operations: union, intersection, difference and concatenation.

 

Viabhav Bhandari’s F# – Functional Approach

In this version of interesting programming concepts, I would like to highlight type system based pattern matching available in F#/OCAML, its very unique and extremely useful if you are parsing a structured list or working on a symbol table.

It’s finally here.  After years of work, F# 2.0 is out and ready to change the way you program in .NET.  Come in for launch information, updates to projects written in F# and some great posts on actually using the language.

 

Don Syme’s F# 2.0 Released!

F# is a productive functional and object-oriented programming language for .NET that enables users to write simple code to solve complex problems. Its succinct syntax and powerful type inference lets users stay closer to the domain they are working in, and the integration into .NET and Visual Studio gives rich access to the expansive .NET platform.

 

Other Posts on the F# Launch

Rob Knies’s F#: Putting the ‘Fun’ into ‘Functional’
Tim Anderson’s Why Microsoft F# is worth exploring
Andre Burdette’s F#: Microsoft’s new functional language

 

Lisa Feigenbaum’s VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcut Posters Now Available for VB, C#, F# & C++

The Visual Studio keyboard shortcut posters are always very popular and are now available for Visual Studio 2010! Please choose the one that corresponds to your choice of Visual Studio Development Settings. Print out a poster to place on the wall, or a quick reference card to keep on your desk.

 

Chris Smith’s Good News and Sad News - Leaving Microsoft

For me at least, the excitement and buzz of the Visual Studio 2010 launch will be short lived. Earlier this month I’ve accepted a position at another software company and will be leaving Microsoft. […]

However, I will still be part of the F# community and you will definitely see a second edition of Programming F# when the time comes.  In fact, next Tuesday 4/20 I’ll be giving a talk: Writing a Java to x86 Compiler in F# at 11:00AM PST.

 

Steffen Forkmann’s “FAKE – F# Make” and NaturalSpec 1.0 Released

Yesterday Microsoft released the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0 and F# 2.0.0.0 and so it is time to announce the first official releases of “Fake – F# Make” and NaturalSpec. Both projects are now compatible with Visual Studio 2010 RC and RTM and the corresponding F# versions.

 

F# Refactor (No Release Yet, Check out the Repository)

Deisgned to bring Code Refactoring capabilities to the F# Language in Visual Studio 2010.

 

Brian McNamara’s Using VS2010 to edit F# source code (and a little LOGO EDSL) and Fun with turtle-graphics in F#

The code on the screen during the video is a little EDSL (Embedded Domain-Specific Language) for a subset of LOGO.  The full code is below; you can just copy it into an F# application project to run it. 

 

Brian McNamara and Chris Smith’s Alt.NET Workshop slides and code

Chris and I each had our own slide deck, so to go in order you’ll have to switch back and forth between the two decks, like we did during the talk (Chris’s intro, my part on functional programming, Chris’s section on OO programming, my part on Async, Chris’s case study).  At the end of my deck there’s also some bonus slides on units of measure that we didn’t have time for. 

 

David Worthington’s ‘Midori’ concepts materialize in .NET

"Midori is an attempt to create a new foundation for the operating system that runs ‘inside the box,’ on the desktop and in the rack.

 

Neil Carrier’s Sliding Block Puzzle in F# and WPF and
Simple WPF Animation

I realized that I wanted something more visual with which to test my search algorithms. I have also been wanting to learn how to write WPF applications using F#. To that end, I offer the following F#/WPF application of the famous Fifteen Puzzle, the ancestor of all sliding-block puzzles.

 

Neil Carrier’s Generic Binary Heap

I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a priority queue for my A* search, so I decided to code a generic heap class in F#. The F# code below is largely a translation from Robert Sedgewick's Algorithms in C (Parts 1-4).

 

Phillip Trelford’s What’s happening? Loosely coupled events

For example if you wanted to publish an event from any window that could be observed by any other window without them all having intimate knowledge of each other.

 

Phillip Trelford’s Implementing IObservable and extending Observable

Following on from my post yesterday on implementing loosely coupled events; the following somewhat longer F# sample provides a simple System.IObservable<T> implementation for event consumers.

 

Daniel Mohl’s A DHT in F#: Using Higher Order Functions for the Service Operation Calls

In my last post, I provided a start to a distributed hash table in F# using WCF.  One of the major limitations of that example was that only two nodes could ever be on the node network at a given time.

 

Daniel Mohl’s Talking to CouchDB via F# and Symbiote

Alex Robson recently announced a set of libraries that, among other things, makes talking with CouchDB from a .NET language very easy. […] As you can see, interacting with CouchDB via F# and Symbiote is a snap.

 

Vladimir Matveev’s MailboxProcessors: Erlang-style concurrency

MailboxProcessor is combination of message queue and message handler build atop of Asyncs infrastructure.

 

Mark Pearl’s F# and the useful infinite Sequence (I think)

So the question is begged - how would you create a sequence that you are sure will be large enough to hold the solution to the problem? Well… You can’t know!

 

Mark Needham’s F#: The ‘defaultArg’ function

While reading through an old blog post by Matthew Podwysocki about writing F# code in a functional rather than imperative way I came across the 'defaultArg' function which I haven't seen previously.