F# Discoveries This Week 09/12/2010

RickM — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 19:06:30 GMT

Perhaps a day late but certainly not a dollar short, I’ve gathered every piece of relevant F# information I could find for your consuming pleasure. I do have a rather good excuse for the delay this time around.

Yesterday I handed in my very final edits for Professional F# 2.0. It’s very exciting to have wrapped up the final details of our first edition. It will be shipping within the next couple of months and I’m just dying to hear what you all think of it.

News

Microsoft Research's F# in Education Workshop on November 5th

“F# in Education is a one-day workshop for educators and industrialists, to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., on November 5, 2010.”

FSUG's September 13th Meeting – Vladimir Matveev on Web Development in F#

“In this talk I will give a WebSharper overview and explore its applications. Code samples will include: rich client-side programming capabilities (WebExcel), integration with existing JavaScript libraries (demo with minor subset of JsRX), and client-server communication.”

TVUG's September 16th Meeting - F# and You!

“Come to our September 16th meeting where Rick Minerich will present F#. F# is a programming language that provides support for functional programming in addition to traditional object-oriented and imperative (procedural) programming.”

Audio and Video

Don Syme's A Taste of F# Today

“Don Syme, the architect of F#, presents to the London F# user group”

Microsoft Research's F# - Putting the Fun into Functional Programming

“Microsoft Researchers discuss F# and it's many applications.”

Tools

LINQPad - 4.26.2 Beta

“You can now to use LINQPad as a F# scratchpad”

General

Tomas Petricek's Parallel Programming in F# Parts 1 - 4

“Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET [^] is a guide written by the patterns & practices group at Microsoft. It introduces .NET programmers to patterns for including parallelism in their applications (using support for parallel programming in .NET 4.0).”

Luke Hoban's Twitter OAuth in F#

“Recently, Twitter moved to require OAuth for accessing Twitter APIs on behalf of a user. Below is the F# code I wrote to integrate OAuth, which should work for any other F# Twitter scripts and apps.”

David Cooksey's Lexing and Parsing with F# – Part I

“FsLex and FsYacc are F# implementations of Ocaml’s Lex and Yacc. They are part of the F# Powerpack released for Visual Studio 2010.”

Mauricio Scheffer's Nullable in F#

“In F#, unlike VB.NET and C#, Nullable<T> is not a language-supported construct.”

Daniel Mohl's Pure-F# Templates Now Support the Visual Studio 2010 Shell SKU

“With the announcement of the F# 2.0 standalone tools update for Visual Studio 2010 Shell, I have updated the pure-F# templates to support the IntegratedShell SKU.”

Neil Carrier's F# Fuzzy0 Update

“Just a quick note to say that the Fuzzy0 reference code has been updated. I added a few comments, a constant output function, and the input modifiers “very” and “somewhat.””

Neil Carrier's Discrete Classification using F# and Fuzzy Logic

“This post shows the first example based on the F# fuzzy logic reference module Fuzzy0. I continue with the theme of tomatoes. The example shows how fuzzy logic can be used to classify items such as tomatoes into discrete categories.”

Array Bounds Check Elimination in the CLR

“If a compiler can prove statically that an array index operation is safe, it doesn’t need to generate a dynamic test.”

Vitality Liptchinsky's Basics of dataflow programming in F# and C#

“This article presents basic implementations of dataflow variable in both C# and F#. Also article demonstrates examples of dataflow programming in C# using futures.
@author Vitaliy Liptchinsky”

Community

Stack Overflow - Handy F# snippets

“I'd like to make this a kind of handy reference page. As such there will be no right answer, but hopefully lots of good ones.”

Teaching, Basics and Others

Aaron Erickson's The Unheralded Benefits of the F# Programming Language

“As great as these features are, there are a couple features, that in my more mundane F# experiences, seem to stand out as things that “save my ass”, for lack of a better phrase, more often than not.”

Mike Murray's F# Pipeline Operator in C#?

“For those regular, non-fluent method calls in the rest of the .NET API, you must use old-fashioned Object-Oriented Programming practices of breaking code up into meaningful, atomic units of statements and naming and encapsulating functions cohesively in order to get more readable code.”

Moritz Lenz's Protected Attributes Make No Sense

“In C++, you can declare an attribute or a method as "protected". Which means that it is private, but subclasses can still access them. This makes just as much sense as saying you only get access to these attributes if you wear a funny yellow hat.”