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...

Hi, I’m Chris Smith. You might know me as the world famous author of Programming F# , but outside of my pseudo-tech-celebrity status I’m a real person. I’m a part time movie critic , avid skier , and a gamer . My passions are deep wide and one thing that...

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...

You may have heard of Tail Recursion before, in fact, you may have even written tail recursive functions before without even knowing it. Even so, why should you care? Safety. Functional programming relies on recursive functions heavily since imperative...

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...

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...

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...

The thing you hear most about F# is that it is multi-paradigm , meaning that you can use it to code in multiple styles of programming. But F# spans multiple-domains too. F# is not only well suited for quantitative computing, but it is surprisingly well...

A look at what the Bootstrapper _really_ is, an unmanaged exe....

Can you nest multiple WCF services in the same IIS application? Sure, but only if you put all relavent source code and binaries in the root level directory....

You may have heard of Active Patterns before – typically in conjunction with the words ‘awesome’ or ‘amazing’. Active Patterns are one of the more unique language features in F# and once you get a good feel for them one of the most powerful. This post will demonstrate Active Patterns from single-case and multi-case to partial and parameterized. If it’s called an Active Pattern, you’ll see an example in this post. So let’s get started....

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...

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...

In this post I’ll focus on creating a simple program which will take advantage of fslex, and show how to generate a scanner to parse basic mathematical expressions like “1.0 / (sin pi + cos pi)”....

How to build a Bootstrapper on the command line via MSBuild...

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...

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...

Programming F# is out! Meaning you can, and should, go to the store and pick up a copy today. With Programming F# serving as a solid guide for the F# Language, I’d like to start posting less about language features and more about applications. That is...

Today I release a Managed DirectX Bootstrapper package on GotDotNet. (You can also find a previously released Bootstrapper package for deploying the 1.1 Framework as well.) You can check it out here: http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx...

Before I act too harshly on Nintendo for having a cooler codename than product name, here is a list of Microsoft codenames which would make for some pretty interesting products....

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...

The history of Bootstrapper manifest adjustments as the .NET FX changed its Darwin dependency...

How to use the dotnetchk.exe to check if a particular version of the FX Framework is installed for custom Bootstrapper packages....

Bootstrapper SDK released!...