F# Discoveries This Week 10/11/2010

RickM — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:45:16 GMT

As always, a ton of great posts this week on a large number of interesting topics. It’s great to be part of such a productive community. I particularly enjoyed Vladimir’s Zebra Puzzle post. The code is just beautiful.

I also have some bittersweet news to share. I’ll soon be leaving Atalasoft to join a yet unnamed company in the NYC area. I’ll miss Atalasoft for sure, it’s a great company full of very smart people. Keep an eye on the career page and you might just be lucky enough to work with these fine folks.

I’m planning on starting a NYC F# user group once I get settled. Please let me know if you’re interested in helping to get it off of the ground.

News

October Community for F# meeting - Trees, Language Oriented Programming and F# with Robert Pickering

When: Tuesday, Oct 19, 2010 11:00 AM (PDT)

“In this presentation Robert Pickering will take a look at the concept of the tree data structure, and we’ll see how trees are everywhere we look in programing”

Adam Granicz's F# MVP Award - 2010

Sorry I missed you last week Adam! Congrats on the award!

Summary of CUFP 2010

“The star of the show was definitely F# in my opinion. The weakest part of the conference was the lack of outlets.”

Mono 2.8 Released

“Mono 2.8 is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems.”

Audio and Video

Anton Tayanovskyy - Developing WebSharper 2.0 Applications

“In this talk Anton will present a pre-release version of WebSharper 2.0 by developing and testing a small standalone JavaScript component.”

Tools / Projects

huwmancode - Release: Release 0.2 Alpha

“Features seamless debug support enabled for VS 2010 - Place a breakpoint in your service code and run! (Make sure to install the service first!)”

RouteTester

“ A sitemap-based url tester that runs in parallel (F#).”

IronJS at 0.1.90-preview

“IronJS - A Javascript implementation for the DLR written in F#”

F# Sample: Google Reader API Port

“This F# Google Reader API code is a port from a project that was originally developed in C#. It supports the 'unofficial' reader API and can get lists of subscriptions, posts, tags etc. for a Google Reader account.”

FSharp.Reactive

“Extensions and wrappers for using the Reactive Extensions (Rx) with F#.”

General

Vladimir Matveev's Solving Zebra Puzzle

“Zebra puzzle (often referred as Einstein's problem) is a well-known class of logic puzzles where you need to reconstruct the missing parts from the set of known facts”

Diego Echeverris Starting with WebSharper Interface Generator

“Sometimes though, the library you want to create wraps for contains hundreds of classes, configuration objects and enumerations. Doing this manually is not only error-prone but extremely boring.”

Steve Gilham's Computing per-service SIDs without sc.exe

“Here's a quick script to do it, that can be the basis for including the computation programmatically into e.g. installer generation.”

Ashley Feniello's 8-Queens in 8 Lines

“Brushing up on “whiteboard coding” for internal interviews… Inspired by Hal Ableson’s streams-based solution to this old classic in the SICP lectures, here’s a pretty concise n-Queens solution:”

Brian McNamara’s Unit tests + debugger = code understanding

“When you have good unit tests, everything is better; if you’re already a TDD-er, then saying that is just preaching to the choir. And when you have a good debugger, using that tool is a great way to learn about an unfamiliar code base (stepping through code, setting breakpoints, looking at stacks, changing values of locals or the next statement to see how things react). Put those two together, and the effect is even more powerful.”

Phillip Trelford's Game of Life

“Michael used a video of Jon Conway himself to explain the rules; which he followed up by showing a very interesting implementation using APL. Afterwards we all paired up to try implementations in various languages. After about half an hour my pair came up with the following F# implementation.”

Dean Chalk's Interacting With WPF Dispatcher Via F# Interactive Window

“So what this means now is that we can create sophosticated WPF controls, invoke them in the FSI window, and then apply long-running upddates via FSI without the WPF window freezing on us.”

Teaching and Basics

Embedded WebBrowser in F#