F# Discoveries This Week 05/02/2010

RickM — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:43:06 GMT

Back this week with another huge batch of F# links. While there’s way too much great stuff to mention, my favorite this week is by a mysterious blogger known only as James. His heat transfer model is short, sweet and very well explained.

If you’re around Boston tomorrow (Monday) be sure to check our F# panel for .NET Rocks! With over 100 people already signed up, it’s sure to be a great time.

The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio Road Trip – F# Edition in Boston (5/3/2010)

Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to your town again to show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! This stop will include an intro to F# and a special topic panel discussion on F# featuring New England F# User leaders.

Rob Knies’ F#: Putting the 'Fun' into 'Functional' (On Dr. Dobbs)

"In the F# team," says Syme, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, "We say, 'F is for Fun.' F# enables users to write simple code to solve complex problems. Programming with F# really does make many programming tasks simpler, and our users have consistently reported that they've found using the language enjoyable."

James’s Modelling heat transfer in F# using 100 lines of code

In this post I’m going to show how we can model the heat equation succinctly in F#. I’m going to consider the two-dimensional case and approximate the solution at discrete spatial mesh points and at discrete time periods.

Brian McNamara’s Game programming in F# (with Silverlight and WPF)

I wanted to learn more about Silverlight, WPF, and Xaml (in the context of F#, of course), so I wrote a fun little game you can play in your browser (or on your desktop). It’s a knock-off of a dozen other similar games, as you can probably tell from this screenshot

Martin Doms’s Implementing the Mandelbrot set in F#

One of my favourite things to do when learning a new language (or graphics package for that matter) is to write an implementation of a Mandelbrot set viewer. So here’s my F# version, annotated to help out anyone who is trying to get to know this language.

Dmitry Lomov’s Finer Points of F# Value Restriction

Type inference algorithms are a fascinating topic – there is an interesting and beautiful theory behind them. Today we will consider one interesting aspect of type inference in F# - it might give you a glimpse of what kind of challenges coming up with a good algorithm in this space presents, and hopefully explain away a stumbling block that F# developers occasionally encounter.

Frank is a functional reactive request/response engine for .NET applications (written in F#)

Frank is inspired by the Ruby dynamic duo of Rack and Sinatra and aims to provide the simplicity of those frameworks but utilizing the powerful functional reactive paradigm for asynchronous processing.

Steve Gilham’s Launching an F# web application inside VS2010 as if it were C#

This is a follow-up to my comments on VS launcher for F# web apps, where I can put an example of the changed markup to the F# class library project to make it act like a web project and launch a browser with your Default.aspx page when you hit F5.

Phillip Trelford’s UML Sequence Diagram: F# Script

Yesterday I fancied moving some hand drawn diagrams to mouse drawn form; but instead found myself battling against a somewhat stubborn and forgetful modelling tool. It left me wondering if there might be an easier way to do this; perhaps by separating the concern of model description from layout.

Daniel Mohl’s A Distributed Hash Table (DHT) in F#: Recursion and Pattern Matching

The simplest implementation defined in the Chord Protocol requires that each node only know about its successor node. The circle of nodes, joined by each successor node association, makes up the node cluster. In order for a node to become part of the node cluster, it must execute a join request to any arbitrary node in the cluster.

Daniel Mohl’s Interacting with RabbitMQ via F# and Symbiote

Last week, I showed how easy it is to talk to CouchDB with F# and Symbiote. In this post, I'll show how you can start interacting with RabbitMQ by adding an additional dozen or so lines of code.

Steffen Forkmann’s Solving KataYahtzee with F# and NaturalSpec

Today I’m starting a new blog post series about solving code katas in F# and with the help of my NaturalSpec project. A code kata is a programming exercise which helps to improve your skills through practice and repetition.

Robert Pickering’s Strings and F# Immutable Lists

The aim of the article is to show that this is not the case, or at least it’s not as black and white as you may think. Specifically we’re going to compare how.NET strings differ considerable in performance characteristics to F#’s immutable lists.

Andre Burdette’s F# Screencast Series

This is the first of future screencasts that I am doing regarding F# programming. In this screencast I show how to use values and functions in the F# language. Enjoy!

Neil Carrier’s A Spell-Binding Tale of Three Recursions

Tail recursive functions often involve accumulators, continuations, and other values which are not really of concern to the ultimate users of those functions. These can often be curried away or otherwise hidden from the ultimate user. This post looks at three obvious techniques for doing so (there are some more that are less obvious), the differences between the three techniques, etc.

Neil Carrier’s Driving Range Pooled Allocator

Large numbers of small allocations can be brutal on a memory management system, especially in terms of CPU time (and in terms of fragmentation on non-GC systems). This post presents an F# implementation of a pooling algorithm I’ve used for many years, and in various languages from C onwards, to solve this problem.

Julien Ortin’s Technical analysis indicators in F# – Misc and Volatility

This is part of a series on technical analysis indicators in F#, based on the multi-language TA-Lib. Quick disclaimer: some of these indicators are not verified.

Vladimir Matveev’s Nature of value restriction

Value restriction is an error that firstly makes a direct hit in the brain of non-prepared developer. It has no straight analogues in the majority of mainstream languages and thus very confusing.

Vladimir Matveev’s MailboxProcessors: Practical Application

Last time we have examined the API of MailboxProcessors. Now it is time to see, how this concept can be applied to solve real-world problems.

Doug Finke’s How to add an F# type to a PowerShell session

The PowerShell Add-Type cmdlet lets you define a .NET Framework class in your Windows PowerShell session. It supports the following languages CSharp, CSharpVersion3, VisualBasic, JScript. It does not support FSharp directly.

Mark Pearl’s F# Objects Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

In the next few blog posts I am going to explore objects in F#. Up to now, my dabbling in F# has really been a few liners and while I haven’t reached the point where F# is my language of preference – I am already seeing the benefits of the language when solving certain types of programming problems.

Mark Pearl’s International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# and Silverlight Part 1 and Part 2

My approach was really simple. I would need a function that would convert a single character to a string – i.e. ‘A’ –> “Alpha” and then I would need a function that would take a string of characters, convert them into a sequence of characters, and then apply my converter to return a sequence of words… make sense?

Mike Hadlow’s Currying vs Partial Function Application

There’s a lot of confusion over these two terms. By myself included. But I’m pretty happy now that I understand the difference and wanted to share my newfound knowledge with you, dear reader.

Bjorn Rochel’s Kata FizzBuzz in F#

Last F# book club meeting in Munich was awesome (as usual). 2 weeks ago we decided to do a Code Kata on each subsequent meeting. This week was our first, with Kata FizzBuzz. This is what we came up with.

Jim Lehmer’s Your language ain’t worth a pair o’ dimes

That's not to say the Real World Functional Programming book is a bad book. It has been an interesting read so far, for sure. I am just going to stop reading the C# parts, thereby allowing the new concepts and new language I am learning to be "pure" in my mind, which should actually help speed up my learning process. And my suggestion to you is if you pick up the book, do the same thing, too. Dump your baggage, start fresh!

Rick Minerich’s The Ted Neward F# Folding Challenge

Take a list of numbers and compress it in a particular simple way but without any mutable state. What makes this problem interesting is that a tech interviewer mentioned that that he hadn’t seen a functional solution to this problem. I also wanted to share this because I think it’s a great example of how to convert an imperative loop into a functional fold.

A .NET Assembly for Cloning Objects with Arbitrary Field Value Changes: IcManipluator

RickM — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:45:00 GMT

After my last post, A Safe and Asynchronous One to Many Stream Copy Through IL and Inheritance ”, I ordered a few books and spent some time playing with generating IL. Along the way I’ve developed a library which allows you to make a franken-clone of...(read more)

Increasing the Size of your Stack (.NET Memory Management: Part 3)

RickM — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:45:00 GMT

In the previous article I discussed a few of the benefits of stack allocation as well as a couple of C# keywords which help you to leverage those benefits. However, the one megabyte default stack size is too small for stack allocation to be used with...(read more)

Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation (.NET Memory Management: Part 2)

RickM — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:06:00 GMT

Articles in This Series Part 1 – Basic Housekeeping Part 2 – Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 – Increasing the Size of your Stack Part 4 – Choosing the Right Garbage Collector Settings Part 5 – Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings...(read more)