Chris Smith's completely unique view

Edit: If you are interested in learning F#, let me take the opportunity to provide a shameless plug for my book Programming F# . Edit: Updated for the September CTP. Edit: While I certainly encourage you to read my blog, there is a great video we...

Edit 8/19: You might notice, the cover is no longer a jellyfish. While I know this is a slight disapointment for some - including myself - trust me when I say I have a plan to remedy this. Stay tuned! So as it turns out my petition for a kickass cover...

You might have noticed my blogging has slowed down to a lull; never fear, this is just because I have been working  it is been because I have been hard at work writing I am working full steam on finishing up Programming F# . But I cannot finish this...

REDMOND, WA - Sadly, after nearly four years of stringing developers along with Microsoft's longest touted non-product, F# was accidentally checked into the Visual Studio 2010 source tree Microsoft sources report. This mistake killed what would have been...

Now that we have covered the basics, in minutes 8 - 14 we will cover the foundational concepts and types in F#. By the end of Part II you should be able to read F# code reasonably well. Immutability You may have noticed that I’ve been using the...

Last Tuesday I gave a talk to the .NET Developers Association entitled Language Oriented Programming in F# . You can find a video of the presentation here *. This essay is the written version of that presentation, which unfortunately doesn’t translate...

I’d like to announce that for the past few months I’ve been secretly working on a book for O’Reilly titled Programming F# . My aim is to provide the one-stop-shop for learning the breadth of the F# language. A special thanks goes out to Nate LaMartina...

Below is a primitive implementation of ROT13 / Ceasar Cipher in F#. In short it is a simple encryption algorithm that works by 'shifting' each letter 13 places. So an 'a' becomes an 'n', a 'b' becomes an 'o', and so on. To decrypt the text you simply...

I’m currently working on a chapter for Programming F# titled Asynchronous and Parallel Programming which should turn out pretty well. Anyways, I have an example that was too awesome not to blog. In this post I’ll show how to use the Parallel Extensions...

Our story begins with this guy, Stuart Bowers, sipping functional programming cool aid out of a kickass mug from Cafe Press . Stuart is a developer on Amalga and full-time F# developer at Microsoft. The world is at a loss because this man does not blog...

In case you didn’t see it over on Brian’s blog, he’s posted a sneak peak at the F# Project System: Part I   Part II . If you’ve used the Visual Studio integrate for our previous releases you might have noticed it was a tad ‘unsavory’. Well the images...

With the latest news about baking F# into Visual Studio I figured re-solving the problems from Project Euler would be a great way to learn F# and hopefully come up with cleaner solutions. This post will go over my solution for problem 1 in F#....

A little personal information about me, I’m currently working on a masters degree at the University of Washington. And a few weeks ago I completed taking a course in Compiler Construction , where the course project was to build a simple Java compiler...

I know it’s cliché to blog about blogging, but I’d like to take this opportunity to explain why there has been such a lull. In short, I’ve been busy. Finished Programming F# As you might have heard, I was working on a book . Well no more! The book...

The Good News You might have heard, Visual Studio 2010 is done, launched, and out the door! That’s right, after several short years F# version 1.0 is generally available! While it’s been alive and well in CTP form for many years, now you can go to...

Recently a friend came to me in a mild panic about some massive refactoring he needed to do to an F# code base. The code he had was very complicated and maintenance was a pain. After only a few seconds scanning through the code I certainly could see that...

With the F# CTP out the door, let’s take a look at what it can do. Ryan Cavanaugh, not the famous Banjo Player , the one on the VS Pro Tools Team, helped me put together an artillery game called BurnedLand. (Kudos if you can catch the subtle reference...

Two weeks ago at PDC Dustin “former blogger” Campbell and I sat down with Keith and Woody to record an episode of Deep Fried Bytes . The show hasn’t been posted yet, but I’m sure it will turn out great. We talked about all sorts of things, from me shamelessly...

Minor update: spelling Lists represent the backbone of functional programming and in order to be an effective F# programmer you must truly master list processing. Fortunately lists are simple and straight forward, so let’s begin. Mastering F# Lists...

Edit 2/8/2010: Updating for recent F# language changes. In our continuing series of how to solve Project Euler problems easily with F#, we now arrive at problem 34 which is defined as: 145 is a curious number, as 1! + 4! + 5! = 1 + 24 + 120 ...

It’s been a few days, so here is Project Euler’s problem 2 in F#. Problem 2 is defined as follows: Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ... Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed one million. Sounds simple enough, here’s my Solution in F#......

Here is a quick write-up on how to solve Project Euler’s Problem 5 in F#....

This week I had the pleasure of writing some of our test automation infrastructure in F#. Not only does this give us a chance to dogfood the language, but it also helps us find pain points in the developer experience. For me at least, the biggest pain point right now is a lack of F# examples surrounding core syntax. But I would like to help combat this, so I've written a very simple app to show how to do basic object inheritance as well as implement an interface....

A couple weeks ago I was in glorious Sandusky, Ohio presenting at CodeMash . CodeMash is a community driven conference that’s less about product announcements and typical “rah rah” and more about getting smart people together to talk about what they are...

At the PDC I spent about eight hours a day for a full week answering the same question again and again: “What is F# and why should I use it.” While I would love to give a long and nuanced answer to this, in order to achieve a high throughput you need...