F# Discoveries This Week 11/22/2009

RickM — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:49:52 GMT

Over this past week at PDC I was lucky enough to see some fantastic sessions and spend time with members of the F# and greater Visual Studio language teams. Naturally, these experiences have left me both floored and swimming in new ideas. This edition of Discoveries This Week includes both the very best of what I saw at PDC 2009 and the most outstanding things I’ve glimpsed going on in the F# community. Please do enjoy.

Reflection on the PDC Keynotes

For the most information in the shortest amount of time I suggest watching the day one and day two PDC keynotes. They are both jam packed with exciting announcements and demos. While at PDC I wrote about my experience watching these here (day one) and here (day two).

Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming

Come hear from several of the Microsoft senior technical leaders about the future of programming, programming languages, and tools.

If you watch just one PDC session let this be it.

With Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter, and Burton Smith, Microsoft’s best gathered to debate the future of programming in a twitter driven panel at PDC. I was happy to be able to contribute with a question on type systems which erupted into quite a disagreement. I will be writing about this session at length, and reflecting on my past thoughts about this topic, in the near future.

Luke Hoban’s F# for Parallel and Asynchronous Programming

F#, a functional and object-oriented language for Microsoft .NET, adds many tools to make parallel and asynchronous programming both fun and easy. Come hear the core concepts of the F# language, and see how ideas like immutability, functional design, async workflows, agents, and more can be used to meet the challenges of today’s real-world applications.

By combining small, easily understood, ideas Luke constructs F#’s big picture in the most engaging way I’ve seen to date. This is now my go to talk for people who are interested in, but new to, the F# programming language.

Jomo Fisher’s F# Scripting, .NET 4.0 and Mixed-mode assemblies

One of the recent problems we’ve seen is that, because of the support for side-by-side runtimes, .NET 4.0 has changed the way that it binds to older mixed-mode assemblies. These assemblies are, for example, those that are compiled from C++\CLI. Currently available DirectX assemblies are mixed mode.

This clever approach to switching the F# REPL to 2.0 binding mode is particularly handy to know.

Matthew Moloney’s Collaborative Development Using F# Interactive

This is a proof of concept of an interactive collaborative development environment I built using F# Interactive. The aim here is to explore different ideas for further development, not so much as to present an alternative to Visual Studio.

I couldn’t pass this very cool idea up. I can’t help but think about extending this to full feldged explorative programming community websites.

Bart Czernicki’s Silverlight 3 and F# Support in Visual Studio 2010

The goal of this blog post is to make you aware of F# support in Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010. In addition, this blog post shows an example why F# is going to be very important for Silverlight architects and developers. Note: This is NOT an intro to F#.

A great post. I am always interested in seeing concrete examples of F# adding value to existing technologies and platforms. I have a sneaking suspicion that there are very few places where it won’t.

PDC09 Keynote Day 2 – Silverlight 4.0 and Free Laptops?!

RickM — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:04:01 GMT

Say goodbye to WinForms, WPF, and maybe even AJAX. Today Scott “The Gu” Guthrie took the stage and blew everyone away with the extensive desktop-app replacing features of Silverlight 4. This occurred directly after the exciting announcement of free Microsoft branded PDC touchscreen Windows 7 laptops for attendees. This one-two punch had an unprecedented shock and awe effect.

Silverlight 4.0

Even Migel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame couldn’t help but tweet his excitement at the announcement of Silverlight 4.

OMG OMG OMG OMG #silverligh4 has everything I wanted on it: full desktop apps with full system access

Silverlight 4.0 Features include:

Trusted Apps / Com Support
Printing / Webcam / Microphone Support
Direct consumption of .NET 4 Assemblies
Multicast Streaming
Native Drag and Drop
HTML Rendering as a Brush
Implicit Styles
Bidi/RTL
Desktop Deployment on Windows and Mac
Built-in DRM
Huge Speedups

And a whole lot more.

I recommend checking out the video for yourself as Scott Hanselmann and Facebook’s Brian Goldfarb gave fantastic demos on these new features.

You can grab the beta of Silverlight 4 here.

The PDC Laptop

The PDC laptop is extremely cool. As it is to be the reference implementation for laptop development it has touch screen, swivel top, the whole nine yards. I’m still waiting for a full charge to power it on but here are some pics to hold you off until then:

Other Annoucements

Also announced was the Office 2010 Toolchain Open Beta which includes Office, SharePoint, Project and Visio. The presentation was hard to follow after “The Gu” left my head spinning but it seems there is a huge number of new features in this release for each of the products involved.

Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : PDC09