Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : reflection, roundup

F# Discoveries This Week 08/27/2010

RickM — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:04:06 GMT

I’m back again with another edition of F# Discoveries this Week. The most exciting announcement this week is the new F# August 2010 CTP which brings with it the ability to build your own VS2010 F# Express Edition with Visual Studio Shell and the prospect of building F# applications on Windows Phone 7. Be sure to check out Daniel Mohl’s Windows Phone 7 template before getting started.

News and Upcoming Talks

F# (August 2010 CTP)

Announcing the F# 2.0 Standalone Tools Update

A standing invitation to F# users to "get in touch"

Don Syme lecturing at the F#unctional Londoners Meetup (9/9)

Tools and Libraries

WekaSharp: An F# wrapper for Weka (Yin Zhu)

F# and C# Win Phone List Template (Silverlight) (Daniel Mohl)

fsai Release FSharp AI library 1.10.0 (Lukáš Kouřil)

RockScroll: my new favourite Visual Studio Add-In (Kean Walmsley)

Video, Audio and Slides

Slides and samples from F# talk in Manchester (Oliver Sturm)

F# Intro Talk at NextGenUG in So’ton (Phillip Trelford)

Slides from Combinators, DSLs, HTML, and F# (Robert Pickering)

Busy .NET Developer’s Guide to F#: Basics (Ted Neward)

Technical Articles

iTunes via F# Interactive (Cameron Taggart)

F# for puzzles (Morse code decoder) (Brian McNamara)

Extracting elements from Win32 resource files (Luis Diego Fallas)

A variation on Matt Moloney's "Memento" pattern (Don Syme)

Bound Variables in F#: What Reflection Reveals (Neil Carrier)

Getting F# Running on a Continuous Integration Server (Ade Miller)

How F#'s async really works? (George Cullen)

Segment Tree in F# (Neil Carrier)

Bound Variables in F#: What Reflection Reveals (Neil Carrier)

Fuzzy Logic Experiments in F# (Neil Carrier)

Fuzzy Logic in F#, Example 1 (Neil Carrier)

Fuzzy Logic in F#, Now More Functional! (Neil Carrier)

F# “fun” with Windows Phone 7 (Fahad)

Getting started with Windows Phone in F# (Senthil Kumar)

Euler Problem 10 (Mark Pearl)

Euler Problem 16 (Mark Pearl)

Project Euler Problem 9 in F# (Stefano Ricciardi)

Project Euler Problem 8 in F# (Stefano Ricciardi)

Project Euler Problem 6 and 7 in F# (Stefano Ricciardi)

Enumerable.Skip vs Seq.skip (Mauricio Scheffer)

Getting Started and Evangelism Articles

Putting the fun in functional programming (Daniel Markham)

Back to school : Getting to know F# (Mehfuz Hossain)

Learning F# by writing C# (Alan Hemmings)

F# - sharper than C# (Josh Reuben)

Learning F# for C# developers (Bill Morrissey)

F# Community

Ars Technica - What do you think of F# ?

SO - How to merge sorted sequences in F#.

SO - Which to use, C# or F#? In this "real world" case

hubFS: F# Databse Application Samples & Articles

hubFS: MailboxProcessor.TryScan paradigm

Discoveries This Week 05/01/2009

RickM — Sun, 03 May 2009 22:58:00 GMT

A few weeks off left me with renewed vigor. This week we have some very interesting posts on reflective and reactive programming, enhancing F# by adding additional operators, IL analysis via simulation and finally, observations on the productization of F#.

Luke Hoban’s Lang.NET presentation on the productization of F#

A set of interesting observations from our experience taking F# over the last 18 months or so […] from a relatively mature research project […] into something that’s going to be a part of the next version of visual studio.

I’ve just begun to watch the Lang.NET videos. While I haven’t had a chance to watch them yet, I’ve heard from others in the community that Amanda Laucher, Jason Olson and Tomas Petricek all had fantastic presentations.

Alex P’s Thoughts on reflective programming with F#

Let's take a different approach. I'm going to bring back a piece of functionality i talked about in earlier articles - quotations, and using quotations to determine function signatures.

The most interesting idea from this post was that of stacking discriminated unions to attach meta information to parameters. This meta information then can be used when reflecting to determine the scope of parameter inputs.

Jason Kikel on Adding Ruby and C# Operators to F#

Ruby (and in many ways Perl) has a bunch of really succinct, elegant operators that contribute to the satisfaction of using the language. […] Since F# doesn’t implement many of my favorite Ruby operators, we’ll put together some implementations here.

Quite a few useful set operators are defined in this post. Many I feel should be included in the language.

Ian Voyce on IL analysis using F#

I recently needed to determine which functions were called by some of our F# code. Naively, you can use existing tools like ildasm, to disassemble a .NET DLL and then search the resulting IL source code for references. The obvious problem here though, is that you’re going to include all references whether or not they’re actually called.

I found Ian’s method of using discriminated unions to represent IL very clever. Also, the possibilities in directly using the AbstractIL API seem interesting. I may have to explore this myself.

J-C on Functional Reactive Programming in F# Parts 1, 2 and 3

A functional, reactive program is a program written in a functional language (where side effects are inexistent (sic) or at least limited to a minimum) and producing results that depend on time, in a continuous manner on one hand and on discrete events on the other hand.

I had not heard of Functional Reactive Programming previously. It seems particularly useful for time sensitive domains such as robotics or game AI.

I apologize for the fact that I’ve disabled anonymous comments. Given the amount of spam I was receiving I had no choice. If you would like to leave a comment, or think you might in the future, I encourage you to take the one time step of creating an account.

Discoveries This Week 01/09/2008

RickM — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:37:00 GMT

It’s been a very exciting week. I actually had more things to post than time would allow me to write about. I’ll have to save them for next time. Blog: Daniel Spiewak’s What is Hindley-Milner? (and why is it cool?) Hindley-Milner is the algorithm all...(read more)