Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : video, F#

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.”

F# Discoveries This Week 09/03/2010

RickM — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:12:19 GMT

One of the greatest things about running this blog, other than having a structured way to read all of the F# community content, is that I’ve been able to watch the community grow in a very concrete way. Looking back to a year ago there was only six posts on F# over the course of a week, now we have well over twenty. It’s truly amazing to see.

Now, on to the links.

Audio and Video

Dr. Ralf Lämmel's C9 Lectures: Advanced Functional Programming - Type Classes

“In this second lecture in the series, Ralf digs into Type Classes, which are type system constructs that were originally introduced to provide a form of ad hoc polymorphism (i.e., an advanced form of overloading).”

Rick Minerich's Functional Language Paradigms with F#

“I've got great news. F# is here and is poised to increase your productivity and reduce your suffering.”

Peter Sestoft's Teaching programming language concepts with F#

“Peter introduces the curriculum, lecture plan and lecture notes for the course "Programs as data" that uses the functional programming concepts in F# to teach students language concepts and implementation details.”

Tools

Essential F# | Refcardz

“This DZone Refcard will lead you through the basic essentials so that you can quickly move on to using this Functional Programming Language for creating some mind-bending code.”

fsxplat - Released: FSharp packages 1.2

“F# packages and samples for use across platforms”

Phillip Trelford's TickSpec: An F# BDD Framework

“Right now TickSpec is intended as a lightweight framework to get you started with BDD using F#. It is standards based, supporting a subset of the Gherkin language, so should be easy to change to another Gherkin based framework like Cucumber, SpecFlow or StorEvil.”

General

Vladimir Matveev's F#: Building compiler from sources.

“Of course, compiling them sources and observing all internal compiler activities, so to say “in action’.”

Ashley Feniello's Fixing Decades-old Bugs in the HP-35

“To make an assembler, I just parse with a series of regular expressions. F#’s active patterns came in super handy for this! In fact, the assembler turned out to be fewer lines of code than the disassembler.”

Ashley Feniello's Microcode-level HP-35 Emulator (in JavaScript!)

“I had the (silly) idea of building a JavaScript-based emulator. Looking at Peter Monta’s Python-based disassembler and his object code listing, it looked simple enough to automatically generate script from David Cochran’s original bits. I wrote my own little straight forward 100-line disassembler in F#, producting an array of JavaScript functions”

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

“The idea is simple; the computer works out all the possibilities for the next 3 letters, and then the human selects which prefixes “look promising” to investigate further.”

Neil Carrier's TechNeilogy: Fuzzy Logic F# Reference Module: Fuzzy0

“Below is the fuzzy logic reference code for module Fuzzy0. Tomorrow I’ll post an example of its use that explores some extensions of earlier techniques.”

Yin Zhu's F# and Data Mining: WekaSharp: Tutorial for using Weka in F#/.Net

“The minimal wrapper in F# for Weka.”

Daniel Markham's Structuring Larger F# Functional Projects

“So here's a suggested structure outline for those larger functional projects”

Ade Miller's F# Samples for Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET

“We’ve been working with the F# Team to get the samples for Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET ported to F#.”

Neil Carrier's TechNeilogy: F#, Fuzzy Logic, WPF, and Tomatoes!

“This is my 100th blog post, and to celebrate, I’m pulling out all the stops. This example will combine F#, fuzzy logic, WPF, and tomatoes!”

Neil Carrier's TechNeilogy: Conjunctive Fuzzy Logic Rules in F#

“It shows how to make multipart conjunctive rules by storing the input sets in a list and using the “min” operator to combine the results into a truncation height. To do this, it adds vector versions of the fire and fire all functions.”

Justin Angel's Windows Phone 7 supports VB.Net and F#

“In this article we’ll review Windows Phone 7 support for the Visual Basic .Net and F# programming languages. Our goal is to demonstrate that Windows Phone 7 can indeed support F# and VisualBasic.Net code libraries and user controls.”

F# Artificial Intelligence Library Tutorial

“This step-by-step tutorial describes how to use the library in fsx script and C# project.”

Chris Marinos's 5 Reasons to use F# Interactive in Visual Studio 2010

“I find that I use F# Interactive more for performance analysis, learning F#, and verifying Base Class Library behavior than for spiking or scripting.”

Community

Stack Overflow - Calling F# (.Net dll) code from php

“Yes you can, by using PHP COM class but it works only on Windows version of PHP5+ and needs no separate installation.”

Stack Overflow - Scrap Your Boilerplate in f#

“I've used the Scrap Your Boilerplate and Uniplate libraries in the Haskell programming language, and I would find that form of generic programming over discriminated unions to be really useful. Is there an equivalent library in the f# programming language?”

Stack Overflow - Path to Become a Better F# Programmer

“What should be my steps from now on to become a better/professional F# programmer?”

Teaching and Basics

Bill Morrissey's Learning F# for C# developers: Scope, Workflow and Lists

“This post is part two of a series of posts looking at syntactical examples of F# and C#. This post will supply you with easy to understand F# coding examples.”

Anders Hesselbom's Type inference in F#

“I have recently been to a short F# presentation at HiQ in Arboga. One of the things that got mentioned was type inference.”

Rey Dacoco's WebBrowser control (Visual F# Windows Forms Application)

“WebBrowser control is a control used to display a web page or web document. To create a WebBrowser control in F#, use the following syntax:”

F# Discoveries This Week 03/26/2010

RickM — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:47:24 GMT

A ton of new posts this week, far too many to enumerate. My “Favorite New F# Blogger of the Week” (seems like this is becoming a trend) is the mysterious Neil of Techneilogy. I’ve been enjoying his honest exploration of F# and semantic networks very much.

Also, I’ve been hanging around in the ##fsharp channel on irc.freenode.net a bit. There’s a bunch of great people there, some of whom are already using F# at work and are eager to talk about it. Check it out if you have the inclination.

Chris Smith’s Writing a StarCraft Bot in F#

We now have all the pieces in place, but creating an AI-bot for a program not meant to be extended will be tricky. StarCraft Bot 9K has the following architecture, which follows the footsteps of the Java ProxyBot available on the AIIDE Website.

Don Syme’s Video Introductions to F# C9 Series

Who better to lecture on the topic than Don? This three part series will serve as an introduction to F#, including insights into the rationale behind the history and creation of Microsoft’s newest language.

Luca Bolognese’s Tracing spread trades in F# parts one (XUnit and FsCheck) and two (WPF and MVVM).

I have a bunch of spread trades open. Spread trades are trades where you buy something and you sell something else generally in the same amount. You hope to profit from the widening of the spread between the price of the two instruments.

Robert Pickering’s #Develop, F# and Google Summer of Code

Chris told me one area they are interested in extending is the F# integration into #Develop; particularly they’d like to get the auto-completion working. So if you’re a CS student on the lookout for a summer job, you could end up being paid by Google to work on F#!

Robert Pickering’s Beginning F# Workshop and Progressive.Net

I’ll in London on the 10th/11th May giving a two day course entitle “Beginning F# Workshop” in conjunction with the lovely folks at Skills Matter.

Edinburgh University’s Advances in Programming Languages Course, Lecture 19: Heterogeneous Metaprogramming in F#

General overview of metaprogramming, with a range of examples in different languages ranging from C macros through Java reflection to MetaOCaml. Brief summary of the F# language, its history, features, and upcoming release in VS 2010.

Matt Moloney’s Dynamically extending applications using MEF and the new F# CodeDom.

I wrote this little applet to see what the combination of MEF and the F# CodeDom would look like, and for the record it looks really really good. This combination opens a whole lot of doors. By using the F# CodeDom the plugin source code can brought in from anywhere;

Julien Ortin’s Technical analysis indicators in F# – Momentum

This is part of a series on technical analysis indicators in F#, based on the multi-language TA-Lib.

Vladimir Matveev’s Solving Python Challenge with F# – The Chronicles

WARNING!!! If you are going to pass through the Python challenge then stop reading this post, cause it contains solution to 24 level.

Vladimir Matveev’s Data structures: Finger Tree (Part 1.5)

Last time we stopped on “immutable deque” stage. Today we will explore a few additions that can endow deque with super (hmm..human/deque?) powers.

Vladimir Matveev’s Fun with recursion

Recursion is an extremly useful tool in the toolbox of every developer. Many problems have recursive nature and thus best solved with recursion. Tree-like stucture is a very nice candidate for demonstration.

Vladimir Matveev’s F# and WPF or how to make life a bit easier

Not so long ago I was working of small F# script (excellent feature BTW) that performs some data processing and displays summary (using WPF)at the end. All the WPF samples I met in the web utilize object model to create UI, but let's make a confession: making relatively complex UI with object model sucks.

Phillip Trelford’s F# Agents and Retlang: quick comparison

Erlang style message passing is a great way of simplifying concurrency. The open source Retlang library aims to bring some of the benefits to .Net languages like C# and VB.Net. Whereas F# has built-in message passing support with the MailboxProcessor also referred to as Agents.

Neil’s Recap of Tiny Expert System and Next Step in the Tiny Expert System?

Before I move on, let me post a re-do of the the original lazy-evaluated style tiny expert system, incorporating all I've learned about F# over the last couple of weeks.

Neil’s Refined Semantic Network, Data-Driven Semantic Network, Latest Semantic Net Experiment, Yet Another Semantic Network and Semantic Net Search 0.1

Continuing on the path of using classic A.I. tutorial examples to teach myself F#, here is an example using semantic networks. So I created a system in which basic semantic nodes and links can be reified into object instances.

Neil’s Search Using Continuations and Improved Continuation Search

This one returns a list in the right order, and the example shows how to detect circularities. It's a little tricky; the tail recursion involves both a direct tail recursion and a continuation that results in a tail call. I had to run tests to convince myself it really wasn't eating up the stack, lol.

Oliver Strum’s DevWeek 2010 Slides and Samples

Last week I was down in London and spoke at DevWeek 2010. As usual, it was a great conference! Thanks to everybody who attended my talks!

Can Erten’s Happy Pi Day and Monte Carlo Method

Calculating Pi is generally the hello world of Monte Carlo Method in Stochastic Calculus. So for today, I will try to give a sample calculation of pi as monte carlo in F#.

Ade Miller’s NBody.net F# Integrators Code Available

A Forward Euler integrator and a wrapper for it which implements a Barnes-Hut tree code. I’ve blogged about this before. It’s an Octree implementation in F# which uses the asynchronous computations feature to scale across multiple cores.

Matt Davey’s F# and XSD.EXE

Which, thanks to Luke over on the F# Visual Studio team, means I can do this: […] Which now means I can stop hand crafting FpML types in my F# cashflow code.

Ebru Cucen’s F# Samples

If you had the chance to start playing with F#, here are some nice challenges for you. If not you may want to look at from where to start.

Daniel Mohl’s Code Kata and Project Euler - Problems One and Two,

See also: Mike Robert’s solution to problem one and Steffen Forkmann’s solution to problem two.

Recently, I've been thinking about the concept of Code Kata and the personal improvement that this type of practice can bring. I started thinking of types of exercises that I could do to utilize this concept. After looking around on the web, I landed on projecteuler.net and found that the problems listed seemed to fit my agenda perfectly.

F# Discoveries This Week 08/23/2009

RickM — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:18:00 GMT

This week Steve Horsfield continues his adventures with WPF while Matthew Podwysocki posts more on the .NET Event Model. Meanwhile, John Harrop shares a video tutorial on F# interactive and Chris Smith provokes meta discussion on the best way to present F#.

Upcoming Events

Houston F# Users Group – Meeting August 27th 7:00pm.
New England F# User Group – Meeting September 7th 6:30pm.

If you would like your F# event to be listed here, please let me know via the email link at the top of this page.

Posts of Note

Steve Horsfield on WPF, Resources and F#

The problem is a simple one: add a toolbar image into an assembly and make it available as a resource in WPF, but use only XAML and F#.

Steve Horsfield on Chaining Side Effects in F#

The first question that any functional programmer should ask is, “why are there side effects?!” Side effects are anathema to functional programming purists because they introduce many kinds of undesirable characteristics into code, limiting optimization and restructuring options.

Matthew Podwysocki on Creating and Disposing .NET Event Handlers

So far in this series, I’ve covered a bit about what first class events are in F# and how you might use them. […] This time, let’s look at how we might manage the lifetime of a given event subscription.

Jon Harrop’s F# Interactive Tutorial Video for Beginners

This is a quick teaching on the use of the F# Interactive Mode which lets you, like the OCaml top level, type code in in real time.

Chris Smith’s F# for Architects: Hitting the Sweet Spot

When I was at DevLink last week I gave a talk designed to specifically identify why and when you should use F#. I was going to post the slides, but then I realized that they are in the form of a ‘presentation deck’ rather than a ‘reading deck’. So rather than having a few vague slogans and images in a .pptx file, I’ve transcribed my talking points.

I would consider Chris Smith’s post a must read for anyone giving talks on, or otherwise promoting, F#. I gave much thought to a number of different aspects of my F# presentations after reading this.