Chris Smith's completely unique view

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...

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...

Some of you may have seen Dr. Brian McNamara’s post refuting my credentials as an evil genius. Lies! All lies propagated by the liberal media! Evidently, he thinks that his superior implementation of a trie , which is faster and uses much less memory...

Hot on the heels of the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate comes the February, 2010 F# CTP . There haven’t been too many changes since the last release, mostly bug fixes and getting the libraries in a consistent state. You can find more information...

Any evil genius knows that if you want to stay on top you need to exercise your mind. Most evil geniuses stay strong by lifting weights with their telekinetic abilities , however I prefer video games. PopCap.com’s Bookworm is one mental exercise I am...

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...

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...

I've gotten a few requests recently for the source code of the examples in Programming F# . I've attached them as a series of F# Script files. In the ZIP file you'll find a few gems such as: A 'state' computation expression Examples of F# Asynchronous...

The ‘F’ in F# stands for fun . However, there are some details in F# that might lead to bugs, surprises, and/or un-fun. This post is to highlight a couple of random ‘gotchas’ when exploring some corners of the F# language.   Overriding Equals and...

In my previous post I went over the theory behind the ID3 algorithm . Now that we got all that painful math out of the way, let’s write some code! Here is an implementation of the algorithm in F#. (It is also attached to this blog post, download it via...

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...

Recently legendary Cambridge research Don Syme presented an Introduction to F# at JAOO Aarhus in Denmark. From what I’ve heard the talk went really well, and the slide deck is a great way to pick up the F# language (or give an intro-level presentation...

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...

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...

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...

If you’ve ever spent a lot of time around the game of Chess you’ve probably seen or interacted with the PGN file format in one way or another. PGN stands for Portable Game Notation and is a concise way to represent Chess games. Using regular expressions...

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...

As the F# team is busy working to finish up Visual Studio 2010 , one task left to complete is to localize the compiler, so that on a Japanese machine the error messages will be in Japanese. While I’m sure a few Ugly American Programmers might question...

There’s plenty going on in the F# community these days, I figured I’d provide a shameless plug for few blog posts or videos I especially liked. Toronto F# Study Group If you live in Soviet Canuckistan and are in the Toronto area, Justin Lee is hosting...

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...

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...

You might be concerned about my lack of blogging, perhaps that I was lost in the woods and perhaps eaten by a bear. Well, unfortunately, all of my time has been devoted to three tasks: Writing Programming F# Passing Programming Languages Shipping F# in...

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...

Episode 24: Chatting about F# with Chris Smith and Dustin Campbell “Get your code on!” Being the international media sensation that I am, back at PDC Dustin Campbell and I recorded a podcast for Deep Fried Bytes . The podcast turned out awesome. Well...

So I was tagged by my new homie Sarah Dutkiewicz AKA Coding Geekette about blogging my goals for 2009. I was on the fence at first about whether or not to share such private information with the world. But after seeing Jay Wren admit to being a “Law and...