Don Syme's WebLog on F# and Related Topics

Come to the F# Workshop and Tutorial in Pisa, Italy, 27/28 June 2012 - "F# for Education and Innovation"

dsyme — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:43:20 GMT

The University of Pisa will be hosting a one-day workshop entitled F# for Education and Innovation on Tuesday 28th June 2012. Please join us there!

The workshop is preceded by an optional Introduction to F# Tutorial, run by Antonio Cisternino at the University of Pisa, on 27th June 2012.

Topics at the workshop will include Strongly-Typed Programming for the Information-Rich World, Why F# for Finance, F# for Computer Science Education, F# for Science and Engineering, Parallel Programming with F#, and Research Experiments with F#.

Hope to see you there!

Don

Workshop aims

The F# in Education and Innovation one-day workshop will be held at the University of Pisa on Thursday 28th June 2012. The workshop provides a forum for attendees to learn and explore the use of F# 3.0 for education, research and in industry.

Topics include:

F# for computer science, science and engineering education;
F# in financial computing;
Latest developments in F# 3.0 for information-rich programming, delivered through Visual Studio 11 and Try F# 3.0.

The workshop will conclude with a panel session discussing F# adoption in academia and industry.

Register here for this free workshop

Introduction to F# Tutorial

The workshop is preceded by an optional Introduction to F# Tutorial, run by Antonio Cisternino at the University of Pisa, on 27th June 2012.

Register here for this free tutorial

About F# - www.fsharp.net

F# is a succinct, expressive and efficient functional and object-oriented language for .NET which helps you write simple code to solve complex problems. F# is simple, type safe, and efficient functional programming language with special expressiveness in parallel programming, scripting, and algorithmic development. F# combines the sdvantages of typed functional programming with a high-quality, well-supported
modern runtime system and the .NET library and tools base.

SkillsMatter Progressive F# Tutorials, New York City, 5-6 June 2012

dsyme — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:29:00 GMT

I'm glad to mention that SkillsMatter will be running their Progressive F# Tutorials in New York City, 5 June 2012!

This is a great opportunity for those on the East Coast of the USA to dive into practical, real-world programming F# from some of the world's best F# speakers. Some details are below, more details via the link above.

Join us for this 2-day, 2-track F# event, packed with hands-on tutorials covering the latest developments in the fast moving world of F# Programming. Whether new to F# or seasoned veteran, be ready for an action packed two day adventure.

experts

Learn and share skills with the F# world's foremost experts on hand, including Don Syme, Tomas Petricek, Phil Trelford and Chris Marinos (and others), each giving hands-on in-depth tutorials which are sure to bring fresh insight and challenge no matter your level of skill.

beginners track

Having some trouble getting a handle on F# or just functional programming in general? Work through our beginner track and start from the basics. You can be confident that after two days of full time functional immersion you'll have some seriously improved skills. No prior F# experience is required whatsoever.

meaty track

Wishing for more meaty F# content? Our advanced track will dive deep into F# 3.0 features, explore how to solve difficult problems using functional programming, and perhaps even glimpse the nature of functional programming itself. This is a rare opportunity to push yourself and learn deeply about the language you've already come to love..

More details and registration here

Cross Posted: Online Training Course for F#

dsyme — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:30:57 GMT

This is cross-posted from the F# team blog. Great to see this!

Training is an important part of adopting F# successfully in any large organization.

There are several options for F# training currently available, but one recent addition is an online training course in F# by Pluralsight, authored by Oliver Sturm. The material is available through a subscription - details on subscriptions to this material can be found on the Pluralsight website.

The sections and durations of the course are listed below, and in more detail on the Pluralsight website.

....

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/fsharpteam/archive/2012/04/24/pluralsight-online-training-in-f.aspx

Updated version of "TrueSkill Through Time" Bayesian Inference Code

dsyme — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:35:00 GMT

Back in 2007 Ralf Herbrich and co. wrote a research paper called "TrueSkill Through Time". Their sample code was written with a pre-release of F# 1.0, and was not updated to F# in Visual Studio 2010.

Here is an update of this code for F# in Visual Studio 2010, as requested by some people commenting on that blog entry. Please note that I'm not an expert in the code, and that it does currently require a database connection to use (to save the analysis results)

More Hadoop+F# Goodness

dsyme — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:56:55 GMT

More F# Hadoop goodness from Carl Nolan. This time a compositional framework for submitting F# and C# Azure/Hadoop map-reduce jobs.

Framework for Composing and Submitting .Net Hadoop MapReduce Jobs

If you have been following my blog you will see that I have been putting together samples for writing .Net Hadoop MapReduce jobs; using Hadoop Streaming. However one thing that became apparent is that the samples could be reconstructed in a composable framework to enable one to submit .Net based MapReduce jobs whilst only writing Mappers and Reducers types.

To this end I have put together a framework that allows one to submit MapReduce jobs using the following command line syntax:

MSDN.Hadoop.Submission.Console.exe -input "mobile/data/debug/sampledata.txt" -output "mobile/querytimes/debug" -mapper "MSDN.Hadoop.MapReduceFSharp.MobilePhoneQueryMapper,MSDN.Hadoop.MapReduceFSharp" -reducer "MSDN.Hadoop.MapReduceFSharp.MobilePhoneQueryReducer,MSDN.Hadoop.MapReduceFSharp" -file "%HOMEPATH%MSDN.Hadoop.MapReducebinReleaseMSDN.Hadoop.MapReduceFSharp.dll"

Where the mapper and reducer parameters are .Net types that derive from a base Map and Reduce abstract classes. The input, output, and files options are analogous to the standard Hadoop streaming submissions. The mapper and reducer options (more on a combiner option later) allow one to define a .Net type derived from the appropriate abstract base classes.

Under the covers standard Hadoop Streaming is being used, where controlling executables are used to handle the StdIn and StdOut operations and activating the required .Net types. The “file” parameter is required to specify the DLL for the .Net type to be loaded at runtime, in addition to any other required files.

As an aside the framework and base classes are all written in F#; with sample Mappers and Reducers, and abstract base classes being provided both in C# and F#. The code is based off the F# Streaming samples in my previous blog posts. I will cover more of the semantics of the code in a later post, but I wanted to provide some usage samples of the code.

As always the source can be downloaded from:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Framework-for-Composing-af656ef7

....

Force-Directed Graph Layout in HTML5 with F# and WebSharper

dsyme — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Do you want to write succinct, type-safe and correct HTML5 web code which is not full of bugs? Writing Javascript-executing code with F# is appealing for these and other reasons I've gone into before, and the open source Pit and WebSharper frameworks give ways to use F# to write HTML5/Javascript code for web and mobile applications.

But what's it like to write this kind of F# code? What's it like to really write efficient, strongly-typed code that converts to Javascript? On DeveloperFusion, Anton Tayanovskyy has written a step-by-step buide to writing a non-trivial HTML5 analytical visualization component using F# and the open source WebSharper framework.

The one thing I'd like Anton to add is how to access the layout logic in the F# component from Javascript (or CoffeeScript). Here I am assuming you may want to access this layout logic from a Javascript component (much as you often want to access an F# component from a C# GUI when writing .NET F# code). [ nb. this bit was edited to clarify, seee Adam's comment below ]

Enjoy!

don

Force-Directed Graph Layout in WebSharper

In this tutorial I demonstrate how to build an interactive force-directed graph visualization running in the browser. Instead of coding directly in JavaScript and HTML5, I take advantage of F#, WebSharper, and Raphael. This technology combo makes it pleasantly simple to navigate the available API. It also reduces mistakes by checking types and units of measure, making the job both easy and fun. Dive in to learn how to make the most out of F# and WebSharper for portable interactive vector graphics in the browser.

....

Next F# New York City Meetup: Tomas Petricek on F# applications - From Domain Model to User Interface

dsyme — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 02:26:00 GMT

The next F# New York City Meetup is now scheduled...

Microsoft Offices, 6th floor, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd Streets, New York, NY (map)

Tomas Petricek on F# applications - From Domain Model to User Interface

Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 6:30 PM

F# is a great language for developing business logic of an application, but it can be also used for elegantly expressing user interactions. In this talk, we’ll look at both sides of the coin. We’ll develop an (almost complete) application for a retail checkout counter.

In the first part of the talk, we’ll start by looking at domain modeling – using F# types like records and discriminated unions, you can write a domain model that fits on a single page. This makes it easier to understand the application just by looking at the source code. Once we have the domain model, we can implement functions of the business logic and add user interface. In the second part of the talk, we’ll look how to use F# asynchronous workflows to elegantly express interaction logic such as scanning products repeatedly and then completing the trade.

Note From Rick: Please only register if you're sure you can make it. We have very limited space and expect demand to be high.

TouchDevelop, from Microsoft Research

dsyme — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:31:32 GMT

Last year, my wonderful peers in Microsoft Research developed the first versions of TouchDevelop, a touch-based programming environment.

You can now find out all about TouchDevelop at the one big URL:

www.touchdevelop.com

and follow them on Twitter at @touchdevelop.

Well done to the whole TouchDevelop team, and to Microsoft Connections for supporting this project. I'm sure many great things are coming for TouchDevelop from here!

Is Javascript code always so full of bugs?

dsyme — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:22:00 GMT

Slightly off topic... The "debugging options" got turned on in my browser recently. I think this happened when I was debugging some web code in Visual Studio.

From this, it's been interesting to see how regularly my web browsing experience is now interrupted by what must surely be outright bugs in Javascript code. Very often these are null object errors. I've always been more than sceptical about Javascript as a language for writing reliable, correct, reusable, efficient code (something F# is obviously good at - and yes, you can compile it to Javascript). But is this kind of bug really the new black?

Separately, I've noticed an extremely disturbing increase in the number of "this web page is not responding" errors. A good time for those working on automated termination proofs to apply their talents to termination of Javascript code...

What really surprises me is that basic code correctness issues such as programming-without-the-curse-of-nulls do not seem to feature on the minds of those on the Lang.NEXT panel. I guess that when your language doesn't control nulls, you don't think its a problem.

Don

I'm Speaking at the Big Picture Seminar at NICTA, Canberra, Tomorrow

dsyme — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:09:14 GMT

I'm taking a vacation "back home", and will be speaking at the Big Picture Seminar at NICTA, Canberra tomorrow lunchtime.

If you're in Canberra, I hope to see you there, and if you're at NICTA I hope you can catch it on the web broadcast.

Reconsidering Strongly-Typed Programming in the Information Rich World

NICTA Canberra Research Laboratory, Friday 23 March 2012, Registration: 12:15pm Seminar: 12:30pm

NICTA Seminar Room, Ground Floor, 7 London Circuit, Canberra

The world is information rich, but why are our programming languages so information sparse? Especially our strongly typed languages? "Information Rich Programming" (IRP) is an emerging direction for strongly-typed language design and implementation, and the F# language is leading the way in this area. In this talk, we'll give an overview of the challenges of strongly-typed IRP against web data markets, semantic-web ontologies, databases and services. Are information spaces "just" libraries? Can we gives types to "everything", and if so, should we? We'll demonstrate what F# 3.0 offers in the area of IRP, but also highlight how information-richness makes us reconsider language design and take a look at the research problems and engineering challenges that come with the territory.

http://www.nicta.com.au/nicta_events/big_picture

Next F# Seattle Meetup this Monday, March 26

dsyme — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:27:14 GMT

The next F# Seattle Meetup is on this Monday!

F# PM Donna talks about F# 3.0 Beta

Modern programming thrives on rich spaces of data, information and services. F# 3.0 brings integrated support for Information Rich Programming to the .NET platform. F# Type Providers and F# Queries greatly simplify data-rich analytical programming, allowing programmers to easily access and manipulate a variety of data sources. In this meeting, the F# Program Manager, Donna Malayeri, will introduce these exciting new features and how they can be used to leverage technologies such as OData, WSDL services, and Windows Azure Marketplace.

F# Seattle User Group

Monday, March 26, 2012, 6:30 PM, Microsoft Building 32, 3620 163rd Avenue Northeast, Redmond, Wa 98052

http://www.meetup.com/FSharpSeattle/events/54784232

F# on Channel 9: Donna Malayeri - F# 3.0 - Information Rich Programming

dsyme — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:53:04 GMT

The wonderful Donna Malayeri appears in the latest F# Channel 9 Lecture on F# 3.0 Information Rich Programming.

Modern programming thrives on rich spaces of data, information and services. F# 3.0 brings integrated support for Information Rich Programming to the .NET platform. F# Type Providers and F# Queries greatly simplify data-rich analytical programming, allowing programmers to easily access and manipulate a variety of data sources. In this lecture, Donna Malayeri, F# Program Manager, introduces these exciting new features and how they can be used to leverage technologies such as OData, WSDL services, and Windows Azure Marketplace.

F# as a Platform for Quantitative Finance: Thursday, March 22, SkillsMatter, London

dsyme — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:34:24 GMT

This Thursday Adam Mlocek of StatFactory will talk about using F# as a platform for quantitative development at the F#unctional Londoner's F# Meetup!

Thursday, March 22, 2012, 6:30 PM The Skills Matter eXchange 116-120 Goswell Road, EC1V 7DP, London (map)

This will be followed by a set of lightning talks 15-30mins on F# related topics including Kit Eason on an optimized actuarial calculation engine and Carl Nolan of Microsoft on F# Charting.You can post a brief title if you'd like to speak.

Please also register for the event on the Skills Matter site.

About Adam:

Adam is the founder of StatFactory Ltd, a company dedicated to development of high performance numerical software with F# API. He holds a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics and is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer. Before his passion for .NET and numerics led him to becoming an entrepreneur, he worked for 14 years in Sydney and London in both analytical and software development roles across banking, insurance, reinsurance and energy trading.

F# Numerics:

In this talk Adam will show how F# allows us to write elegant .NET numerical code that runs on both CPU and GPU. We will start with a short introduction to F# and GPU programming. Then we will look at F# implementation of multidimensional matrix library and compare it to Matlab®. Finally, we will go through 2 simple F#/Matlab® examples of calculating Pi and pricing a euro option by Monte Carlo on both CPU and GPU

Visual F# 3.0 Beta now available in Visual Studio 11!

dsyme — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:59:52 GMT

Over on the F# team blog the Visual F# team have announced the availability of Visual F# 3.0 Beta now available in Visual Studio 11 !! The announcement is included below.

This release contains the new features described below, plus all the usual F# 1.0/2.0 goodness, plus F# 3.0 Information Rich Programming, which has been available in preview since September and was presented at BUILD.

The Visual F# team in Redmond have worked very hard on delivering these programming features, and congratulations to them for reaching this major milestone! It is a huge pleasure to be working with this wonderful and incredibly dedicated team.

Speaking on behalf of the MSR side of the F# work, I'd like to add a big “thank you” to Keith Battocchi for his contribution to this release. Keith has been contracting for MSR Cambridge from Boston, preparing F# 3.0 IRP for release and helping to communicate it broadly. Thanks also to Kenji Takeda, Matt Moloney, Evelyne Viegas and Vassily Lyutsarev for assistance with the broader agenda around Information Rich Programming.

If you would like more information on how to learn and adopt F# as part of your work, please see http://fsharp.net.

Enjoy!

Don

As announced on Jason Zander’s blog, Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download! The release includes the Beta version of F# 3.0, which introduced F# Information Rich Programming.

We have some new F# features to announce in this Beta release, including portable library support, enhancements to type providers, improved IntelliSense, and an AnyCPU version of FSI. We’ve also updated the F# 3.0 sample pack for Beta.

Portable Libraries

F# now has support for portable libraries, which allows you to create assemblies that work on more than one .NET platform, without requiring recompilation. You can put your analytical code in an F# portable library and reference it from a WPF, Silverlight 5, or Win8 Metro application.

For example, you could create a spreadsheet program with both a Silverlight 5 and Metro front-end (see screenshots below). All of the spreadsheet logic, such as parsing and executing formulas, can be factored into an F# portable library, and the front-end projects contain only UI code.

Silverlight

Metro

Like the example? We’ll soon be publishing the source code to Codeplex—stay tuned for details.

Type Providers

On the type provider front, we’ve improved our New Item templates for type providers. There are templates for a SQL database connection (using either LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities), an OData connection, or a WSDLconnection. If you’re new to type providers, these templates are a great way to get started.

The WSDL type provider now supports configuration files and named endpoints, to handle the case when one service offers multiple endpoints. Most of the providers also have the parameters ConnectionString and ConnectionStringName which let you use configuration files more easily. There are also additional parameters that make it easier to work with relative directories.

We’ve also made type providers easier to use. The built-in type providers no longer require the “[<Generate>]” attribute, and now you can clear a type provider’s cache by cleaning the project or closing the script file.

For type provider authors, we’ve expanded the set of language constructs that are supported in provided members, such as lambdas. This was made possible by changing the type provider infrastructure to use Microsoft.FSharp.Quotations.Exprs rather than System.Linq.Expressions.

IDE

In this release, we’ve added even more IntelliSense enhancements—in addition to the ones you’ve already seen, such as parameter help. IntelliSense now does more context-sensitive filtering (for instance, after the inherit keyword), and now supports camel-case filtering. For instance, Console.WL will auto-complete to Console.WriteLine.

Type providers don’t always provide IntelliSense immediately—such as when querying a web service—so in these situations, the IDE will show a progress icon, as in the screenshots below:

FSI AnyCPU

The F# Interactive executable (FSI.exe), is a 32-bit program, so only 32-bit assemblies can be used in it. Since 64-bit assemblies are becoming more common (such as in the new Cloud Numerics library), we have created an AnyCPU version of FSI, which is located in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\F#\3.0\Framework\v4.0\FsiAnyCPU.exe” by default. To use this version of FSI, set a different path in the F# Tools options:

Resources

You can install Visual Studio 11 Beta on Windows 7 to get up and running quickly, or set it up on top of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which has also just been released. Read more about F# 3.0 features in the blog post from the Developer Preview release. Be sure to check out some of our videos, the F# 3.0 Sample Pack, or the F# Developer Center. As always, we look forward to your feedback—post on the F# forums or UserVoice.

Donna Malayeri
Visual Studio F# Program Manager

Next Seattle F# Meetup, Tuesday Feb 21, 2012

dsyme — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:58:41 GMT

Seattle F# user group meeting Feb 21, 2012

Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 6:00 PM. Microsoft Building 99, Room 1919-C, Redmond, WA (map) 47.641712 -122.140670

As with the previous meetup, we have two sessions + one tiny program contest:

Ryan Riley (F# MVP) : Web Apps and APIs with F#

Most .NET web applications today use ASP.NET WebForms or MVC. However, several F# libraries offer new ways to build web APIs and applications help reduce code and offer better abstractions, especially for single-page applications (SPA). We'll start with an existing web application written in C# using both WebForms and MVC and transition first to a F# application that follows the same patterns, then transition again to using several tools that expose the additional power offered by F#.

F# team member Jack Hu (MSFT): F#, The American Dream

Since F# became a first-class programming language in Visual Studio 2010, it has been gaining popularity among the financial and scientific communities. In this talk, we will showcase several F# applications in the context of financial investments. We will highlight F#'s value propositions, through the themes of simplicity, powerfulness and programmer satisfaction. We'll also take a look at current industry adoptions, who uses F# and what they gain from it. The majority of the talk will be slightly technical and look at some of innovative aspects of F# 3.0 that help to simplify programming and achieve great results ' F# 3.0 typeProvider ' F# 3.0 Query ' FsharpChart ' .Net Integration ' Async programming ' Units of measure ' TryFsharp.net

F# programming contest

question will be disclosed at end of the meeting and winner will be announced at the next meeting.

Special thanks to Chris Brockett from MSR for reserving a nice place for this meeting!

MSR (Microsoft building 99, room 1919-C)

Functional Programming eXchange 2012, March 16, 2012, London

dsyme — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:52:42 GMT

The folks at SkillsMatter in London are hosting the Functional Programming eXchange 2012, on March 16, 2012, in London!

Join the Functional Programming community for a one-day conference jam-packed with talks, open-space discussions and brainstorming. Learn and share the latest innovative ideas, best tools and practices in the different languages (scala, clojure, haskell, F#) and environments. Read the full programme and book tickets here.

What: Functional Programming eXchange 2012

When: March 16th 2012, Breakfast and registration at 8.30

Where: Skills Matter, 116-120 Goswell Road, London, EC1V 7DP

Twitter: #functionalpx

Program and tickets: http://bit.ly/DSFunpx

Enjoy!

Don

F#/C# Contract Position for Silverlight/HTML 5 User Interface Development at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

dsyme — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:32:00 GMT

Microsoft Research Cambridge has available a 6-month contract position for development of web-based user interfaces for designing and simulating computer models of biological systems. We are looking for an experienced and highly-motivated individual to produce easy-to-use interfaces for the software tools developed by our Computational Science Lab. The aim of the post is to produce user interfaces to simplify and encourage the trial and adoption of our research prototypes within the wider research community, and the initial focus of the work will be on software for Biological Computation (http://research.microsoft.com/biology).

The user interfaces will be for a family of modelling languages, which are being used in a number of key scientific projects, from building computational circuits in DNA (http://research.microsoft.com/dna), to genetic engineering of living cells (http://research.microsoft.com/gec), to understanding and predicting the response of the human immune system (http://research.microsoft.com/spim). The candidate will be working in an exciting new field at the intersection of computer science and biology, and the results of the project could potentially have an impact on a broad community of researchers, both in academia and industry.

The first phase of the project will involve investigating the feasibility of translating existing computational modelling software from Silverlight to HTML5, with the help of existing translation tools such as Websharper (http://www.websharper.com) and Sharpkit (http://sharpkit.net).

The second phase of the project will involve investigating the feasibility of translating a Silverlight visual editor to HTML5. The visual editor relies on a C# library for graph layout, developed within Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/msagl). There is also an opportunity to extend the C# library to improve its visual editing capabilities.

This is an exciting opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge software development, visual programming language design, and research into computational modelling of complex natural systems The candidate must be willing to work in Cambridge, UK, and the contract is for 6 months with the possibility of extending this to 2 years. Interested candidates should contact Andrew Phillips (firstname.lastname@microsoft.com) with a CV. The start date is flexible, however the position is available from February 2012.

Duration: 6 months

Location: Cambridge, UK

Required skills:

HTML5, Silverlight, WPF, C# programming
User interface development
Ability to capture user requirements and translate these into easy-to-use tools

Additional desired skills:

Knowledge of automatic graph layout algorithms
Experience in developing visual editors
Experience in F# programming

First F# Seattle Meetup This Saturday, Redmond

dsyme — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:42:00 GMT

The first F# Seattle Meetup has been announced! It will be held this Saturday, on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

http://www.meetup.com/FSharpSeattle/events/49365112/

Don

In this first meeting, we will introduce F# and the new features in F# 3.0 and how to use F# in the daily programming tasks.

F# Introduction and 3.0 New Features

Saturday, January 28, 2012, 2:30 PM

Microsoft building 32 - Room 1027

3620 163rd Avenue NE, Redmond, WA 98052

London F# Meetup Group this Thursday: Pacman Kata

dsyme — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:44:34 GMT

This Thursday, January 26, the F#unctional Londoners are holding an event to help you improve your F# coding skills! (This event may or may not be in celebration of Australia Day and India's Republic Day - you decide!)

This event will be a coding kata. If you don't know what this is, here's the description from Wikipedia:

Code Kata is a term coined by Dave Thomas, co-author of the book The Pragmatic Programmer, in a bow to the Japanese concept of kata in the martial arts. A code kata is an exercise in programming which helps a programmer hone their skills through practice and repetition.

Here's the story for the event:

Pacman finds himself in a grid filled with monsters. Will he be able to eat all the dots on the board before the monsters eat him?

pacman is on a grid filled with dots
pacman eats dots
pacman stops on walls
ghosts follow pacman...

The F#unctional Londonders Meetup Group starts 2012 with a hands-on coding Kata by implementing Pacman. This session is suitable for people new to F# who'd like to learn more and for more experienced F# developers looking to practice their skills. See also: http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataPacMan for more info, and be sure to register your attendance here: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/pacman-kata/js-2040

Don

F# 3.0 at TechDays France, Feb 7, Paris!

dsyme — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:43:00 GMT

Just to mention that there will be a talk on F# 3.0 at TechDays France in Paris, on February 7, at 4pm.

F# 3.0: data, services, Web, cloud, at your fingertips (LAN209)

You can find all the details here: http://www.microsoft.com/france/mstechdays/programmes/parcours.aspx#SessionID=50dbf05c-e3fd-4129-b5d9-c2b458236728

Modern programming thrives on rich spaces of data, information and services. With F# 3.0 and Visual Studio 11, you now have a tool that massively simplifies information-rich analytical programming. F# 3.0 provides integrated support for F# Information Rich Programming, a new and powerful way of integrating data and services into your programming experience. In this talk, we will describe the new features of F# 3.0, including the first released version of F# Type Providers and F# Queries, with apps to leverage technologies such as SharePoint, Azure Data Market, OData, Entity Framework and SQL Server.

F#, WebSharper, JavaScript, HTML5, Mobile etc.

dsyme — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:03:00 GMT

I'm catching up on blogging about what's been going on in F# lately.

One thing that happened over the vacation is that the F# HTML5/Mobile development tool called WebSharper is now open source, and free for use for open source projects (details on the site). There is also a community project called Pit (also on github) which compiles F# to JavaScript, and which I'll write about separately. You can use these today in conjunction with F# 2.0 in Visual Studio 2010. With WebSharper there is ASP.NET integration as well, and add-ons to target extra web/HTML5/mobile functionality.

If you don't know about WebSharper, the website is here. The guys behind the project call WebSharper "the world's most versatile web and mobile development platform".

As we all know, there is a growing amount of activity in compiling languages to JavaScript, e.g. languages like Dart. Now, compiling-to-JavaScript is not functionality Microsoft include with F# 2.0 or 3.0. But personally I think its great to see the F# community compiling F# to JavaScript with both WebSharper and Pit. It seems like this is an area where the community will be really active.

And I can see why. When you do JavaScript/HTML5/mobile programming with F# as the development language, you get the usual F# goodness: strong typing, full intellisense, type inference, asynchrony, pattern matching, Visual Studio development, units of measure, ... and the power of a modern typed functional programming language. You also get the performance and functionality of .NET for the portion of your code that runs on the server side. No need to use NodeJS on the server to get a homogeneous language across client/server. And no need to wait for new languages. Indeed, this is related to the research vision pursued by Tomas Petricek when he first got involved in F# back in 2006.

Furthermore, on the server-side you get the option of cloud integration, including the Azure technologies for ASP.NET, Hadoop on Azure and Cloud Numerics, and emerging tools like M-Brace. This gives homogeneous strongly-typed programming with a modern, high-productivity functional langauge, all the way from device to cloud, and encompassing the traditional enterprise along the way.

Equally, I can see the attraction of other techniques for the device UI, and that would be our normal recommendation for F# in the absence of WebSharper and Pit. HTML5 and JavaScript are themselves a great ecosystem. And you can use standard JavaScript/HTML5 (or CoffeeScript/HTML5) over F#-implemented services on the server-side. The F# MVP Dan Mohl has been tweeting and blogging about those possibilities a lot lately.

My personal belief is that JavaScript/HTML5 progrmaming will, over time, trend towards a range of languages which will support homogeneous client/server programming. JavaScript itself is and will remain huge. But it seems we're sure to continue to see typed languages that compile to both JavaScript and .NET/JVM/.... (GWT, Opa etc.) If you look at these kinds of languages, it seems to me that F# is nicely set up to play well in this space over the long term. F# is a succinct modern language, and logically speaking the language is relatively independent of .NET. Also, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, F# translates quite nicely to JavaScript, and indeed is quite similar to JavaScript in its focus on things like functional-first programming and asynchrony.

So, is F# "just" a .NET language? If you ask the F# community, it encompasses HTML5 and JavaScript as well. And certainly F# is an ASP.NET and Cloud language, through .NET, and for my day-to-day work my focus is on compiling F# to .NET and other implementations of the CLI (well, I'm very much focused on the wonderful new features for F# 3.0 available in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview). But the community seem to be taking F# to JavaScript/HTML5, and indeed F# was very much designed with this kind of flexibility in mind.

In any case, I like the idea that a language like F# is a living thing and that the community are doing things along these lines. Through making and using these tools they are taking F# to important places.

Don

F# Training in London in January and February: Functional Programming in .NET and Real World F# Programming

dsyme — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:06:22 GMT

Is it time to learn something new?

Training is key to growing F# adoption and understanding in your enterprise, as well as increasing the skillbase of your C# and other programmers mroe generally.

Here are some links to F# training courses in London in January and February, from the wonderful Tomas Petricek and Phil Trelford

Functional Programming in .NET (in London on 30 January and 16 April)
The course is designed for developers with some C# background who want to become better programmers and learn F# on the side. For booking, visit SkillsMatter web site or contact them directly.

Real-World F# Programming (in London on 8 February and 11 June)
The course is designed for people with some existing F# experience. It focuses on the most applications of F#, including data processing, asynchronous and concurrent programming. For booking, visit SkillsMatter web site or contact them directly.

Don

Microsoft Releases Local, Distributed and Cloud Numerics Library, with F# Samples

dsyme — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:00:39 GMT

At last, Microsoft have released its long awaited Cloud Numerics library!!! A huge congratulations to the Cloud Numerics team (follow their blog!), and I encourage everyone in the F# community to be looking at the use of these wonderful technologies together.

The recently announced library is a great fit for F# analytical computing. The Cloud Numerics team have posted some examples of how to use this library in F#, and learn how to do distributed numerics on Azure with F#.

This post walks through the steps required to use the “Cloud Numerics” distributed numerical and data analytics library from F#. While the “Cloud Numerics” lab focuses on C#, a few additional setup steps enable you to:

Write F# applications that use the “Cloud Numerics” lab libraries.
Use the deployment utility to scale-out your F# application to the Windows Azure cloud.

...calling these methods from F# methods feels natural. For example, consider the following F# source code example:

open Microsoft.Numerics
 // Compute the standard deviation for each time series
let stdev = 
 let sum = ArrayMath.Sum(timeSeriesNormalized * timeSeriesNormalized, 0L)
 let sqrt = BasicMath.Sqrt(sum / float(timeSeriesNormalized.Shape.[0]))
 Operations.MatrixMultiply(sqrt.Transpose(), sqrt)

Before You Begin

Before you begin to write “Cloud Numerics” F# code, complete the instructions in the “Cloud Numerics” Getting Started wiki post to:

Create an Azure account (if do not have one already)
Install “Cloud Numerics” on your local computer where you develop your F# applications
Configure and deploy a cluster in Azure
Submit the sample C# “Cloud Numerics” program to Azure.

Once you are able to build and run the sample C# application provided with the “Cloud Numerics” project template, you are ready to follow the steps in this post to create an F# “Cloud Numerics” application.

If you are interested in testing your “Cloud Numerics” F# project locally, on your local development machine, follow the steps in the Getting Started wiki post to run the sample application locally.

Of course, before you begin, you also need to have F# installed: go to http://fsharp.net and install the Visual F# CTP (April 2011).

Come and work with the F# group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge!

dsyme — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:19:00 GMT

Come and work with the F# group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge!

Microsoft Research in Cambridge has open positions for very high quality applicants with advanced computer science skills (normally recent PhD-level graduates or highly relevant industry experience), and internships for current PhD candidates or other talented masters students.

I would like to encourage potential candidates interested in any topic related to

F# itself, as a language and tool set
Topics on the boundary of F# and its applications (for example, GPGPU programming with F#, variaitons on Hadoop programming with F# or other parallel/advanced programming)
Variations on "Information rich programming" with F# and massively rich information sources, including other variations on meta-programming and compiler extensibility

A particular growing interest area for pulling advanced F# experimental work together is in the field of web-delivered, data-rich cloud programming. Think of taking some of the world's greatest applied programming language work, delivering it to high quality in educative web-delivered learning environments, combine it with innovative techniques for strong typing and information-rich programming, combine with the wealth of rich information sources that make the modern web, integrate with modern backend execution environments, strategies, machine-learning tools and products, both homogeneous and heterogeneous, and deliver it into the hands of real users. And that's just a starting point.

Often postdoc and intern positions at MSR have a 100% theory/research/publication focus. However, in this case we are explicitly interested in candidates who would like to pursue a combined practice & research agenda, looking for a virtuous feedback cycle between the two. In this situation, the joy of making things, playing with real software and delivering it to thousands users is valued as much as writing a paper. Candidates might also see this position as a transition step to a research position, a startup, a lead product development role, or to an academic role where hands-on practice is highly valued.

If you are completing your PhD, or have recently completed, and would like to consider working in this kind of field at MSR Cambridge, then please feel free to apply directly to me (dsyme AT microsoft.com), or apply directly for a postdoc position or an internship.

Don

Some F# Programming Jobs in London

dsyme — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:02:00 GMT

Regular readers of my blog will know that from time to time I post links to F# jobs as a courtesy to the F# community.

I particularly follow those in London, where we have F#unctional Londoners and other functional/finance/.NET user groups. Here are a few: