F# Discoveries This Week 05/14/2010

RickM — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:06:49 GMT

Today, I’d like to thank all of the F# users on twitter.

Twitter’s a great place to stay up to date on the latest F# happenings and many of the posts you see here are either written by or passed on from members of this community. So, if you are interested in becoming part of the F# Twitter Community, I suggest starting with these frequent F# tweeters: @dmohl, @TigerHasse, @robertpi, @sforkmann, and @ptrelford.

I’ve also been known to occasionally tweet on F# and other programming topics. Now, on to the links.

Brian McNamara’s More F# Screencasts

My previous two screencasts (‘Getting started with F# in VS2010’ and ‘Editing F# source code in VS2010’) have been moved to MSDN, which means they’re now available in a variety of video formats. A new screencast (‘Managing F# projects in VS2010’) has also been added, so check it out!

Robert Pickering’s F# Talks in London

I’ve been in London for the past few days. I arrived Tuesday afternoon and gave at talk at “The F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group” on the Tuesday evening.

James McCaffrey’s Combinations and Permutations with F#

Understanding combinations and permutations is a fundamental skill in software testing. In this month’s Test Run column I show you how to work with combinations and permutations using code written in the new F# language.

Amanda Laucher and Josh Graham’s Pragmatic F# in Action (video)

Amanda Laucher and Josh Graham introduce the audience to F# basics showing some of its main features, emphasizing what makes it better than imperative languages.

Tomas Petricek’s ASP.NET and F# Part 1 – Creating MVC Web Applications in F#

If you want to use F# for creating an MVC application, you have a few options. It should be possible to create the web application solely as an F# project. However, we'll use a more convenient approach. We'll create a standard C# MVC project and move all the actual implementation to an F# library.

Steffen Forkmann’s FAKE – F# Make 1.20.0 Released and
Using a MailboxProcessor to speedup “FAKE – F# MAKE”

Today I released a new bugfix release for “FAKE – F# Make”. We fixed some path and logging issues and as a new feature we introduced the @@ operator which allows to combine paths.

Phillip Trelford’s Trading on IM with F#

The slides from my Trading on IM talk will be attached to this post, and the video/podcast should be appear on the Skills Matter website. I’ll also attach the 100 lines of code for shopping checkout sample, that works with a barcode scanner, I showed at the start of my presentation.

Daniel Mohl’s Integrating F# and Erlang Using OTP.NET

Recently, I ran across a post that talked about a .NET library named OTP.NET. OTP.NET is a port of a Java library named JInterface that allows a .NET application to act as an Erlang node. OTP.NET hasn't been updated in a while and the API is a bit clunky, but the provided functionality is very cool.

Nick Grattan’s Creating Web Parts with F# and
An EDSL for Emitting HTML Tables in Web Parts using F#

When writing web parts in C# for SharePoint the System.Web “table” class or “table” HTML elements are most often used for controlling layout (“div” aficionados keep your ears covered…). The code quickly gets ugly and difficult to manage – there’s no direct control to ensure correct matching of opening and closing of tags. So how about writing an EDSL that provides a syntax and constructs for doing this?

Neil Carrier’s Tiny Expert System using Monads

Below is a tiny expert system implemented using computation expressions. I managed to find a way to use the following computation expression methods: Bind, Delay, and Return.

Neil Carrier’s A Simple DSL: Tokenization to Evaluation,
S-Expressions for Semantic Networks and
A Half-Baked Scheme

This post presents a small example of the above process. It implements a small interpreter which analyzes and evaluates LISP-like prefix expressions involving integers, multiplication, and division. For example: (+ (* 1 2) (* 3 4) evaluates to a data element containing the number 14. To make clear what is happening, be sure and examine the value of tokenList before it is evaluated.

Julien Ortin’s Technical analysis indicators in F# – Bands, Signal and Ehlers

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.

Yin Zhu’s F# for Project Euler Problems

Some problems have two versions of solutions, the version I first learned F# and the version based on my current knowledge of F#. The first version is usually quite easy to understand even if the reader does not know F#, while the second uses some nice F# feature or good functional programming practice in general.

Jon Harrop’s Java vs. F#

What Cliff forgot to mention is that .NET also provides value types and a far more compelling example than complex numbers is the humble hash table.

Tim Ng’s F# + WPF + Events

I recently had to do some travelling for the VS launch event in Las Vegas and QCON event in Beijing. One of the things thats nice about travelling is that it gives you time to do some things you may not otherwise do - in my case, I had a chance to try to (re) learn WPF and see how I can use F# with WPF.

Mark Needham’s Tacit Programming

I realised that this approach quite closely describes what I've been trying to drive towards in my most recent playing around with F# and it's actually quite fun trying to drive any intermediate state or storing of data in variables out of a program and just relying completely on function composition and higher order functions.

Mark Needham’s F#: My current coding approach

I spent a bit of time over the weekend coding a simple generic builder for test objects in F# and I noticed that although there were similarity with the ways I drive code in C# or Java my approach didn't seem to be exactly the same.

Ebru Cucen’s F# vs C# Samples

After my talk at ldnUG yesterday, I got nice suggestions from Zi Makki, and here is the first one: comparison between F# and C#, especially using LINQ. This subject had been quite popular once in a while, now it is probably my time to focus on this subject.

Bjorn Rochel’s Kata StringCalculator in F#

Two meetings ago we decided to do some coding on every meeting. The previous meeting we solved Kata FizzBuzz and on yesterday’s meeting we tried to dance with Roy Osheroves Kata StringCalculator.

Gunnar Peipman’s F# in ASP.NET, mathematics and testing

Starting from Visual Studio 2010 F# is full member of .NET Framework languages family. It is functional language with syntax specific to functional languages but I think it is time for us also notice and study functional languages. In this posting I will show you some examples about cool things other people have done using F#.

Luis Diego Fallas’s Defining mutually recursive classes in F#

As explained in Adventures in F#--Corecursion defining mutually recursive functions requires the use of the and keyword between function definitions. As briefly mentioned in the Type Definitions section of the manual, the and keyword can also be used in types.

Nancy Strickland’s New Features in F# 2.0 Training Video

Describes the new features in F# version 2.0, which comes included in Visual Studio 2010.

DotNetRocks in Boston (with F# Panel)

The panel suggested we add F# to our repertoire and understand its strengths, and use it where it's beneficial. I'm going to take that advice. Bottom line is if I can replace 50 lines of confusing C# code with 10 lines of elegant F#, I've done myself a service.

Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : math, dsl

F# Discoveries This Week 05/14/2010

Steffen Forkmann’s FAKE – F# Make 1.20.0 Released and Using a MailboxProcessor to speedup “FAKE – F# MAKE”

Nick Grattan’s Creating Web Parts with F# and An EDSL for Emitting HTML Tables in Web Parts using F#

Neil Carrier’s A Simple DSL: Tokenization to Evaluation, S-Expressions for Semantic Networks and A Half-Baked Scheme

Julien Ortin’s Technical analysis indicators in F# – Bands, Signal and Ehlers

Steffen Forkmann’s FAKE – F# Make 1.20.0 Released and
Using a MailboxProcessor to speedup “FAKE – F# MAKE”

Nick Grattan’s Creating Web Parts with F# and
An EDSL for Emitting HTML Tables in Web Parts using F#

Neil Carrier’s A Simple DSL: Tokenization to Evaluation,
S-Expressions for Semantic Networks and
A Half-Baked Scheme