Update: The template I posted yesterday was for PowerPack 1.9.9.9 which is not the most recent version available. I have since updated the template to target PowerPack 2.0.0.0. If you installed the old template you may need to uninstall at Tools\Extension...

Jomo Fisher—I’ve spent a little time looking at the OData Web Service Protocol . There is quite a lot to like about it. It is an open, REST-ful format for communicating with a web service as if it were a database. You can query an OData service with LINQ...

Jomo Fisher—F# has a functional heritage but it is actually very good at OO as well.  Here’s an example of its nice, clean syntax for declaring a class: Code Snippet type Vector(x : float, y : float) =      member this.X = x      member this.Y =...

Jomo Fisher—Quick sample today. I’m mainly posting this because it took me a while to figure it out and I hope it might save someone some time. This is the F# code you would useto enumerate all WMI classes on your system and show the properties...

Wow, check out Chris’s StarCraft bot in F#: http://blogs.msdn.com/chrsmith/archive/2010/03/18/writing-a-starcraft-bot-in-f.aspx

We’re hiring a developer to help advance our cross-platform presence. Please do send and application if this looks like a good match for you. From Don Syme’s blog:   Contract Position in the F# Team: Compiler and Visual Tools Software Engineer for...

Jomo Fisher—I posted yesterday about using MEF in F# programs. In the comments Oldrich asked if it was possible to do the same thing in F# scripts. It is indeed possible. It actually looks like a really powerful combination because you can naturally extend...

Jomo Fisher—The Managed Extensibility Framework is an interesting new technology in .NET 4.0. It lets you set up a plug in system for your application so that your program can acquire new functionality just by, for example, adding a .dll into a particular...

Jomo Fisher – I recently posted about the freebase web service here . This sample reads biological classifications and renders them in DGML. The result is a huge graph, here’s a little piece of it: Code Snippet // FreebaseDgml.fsx // Example of reading...

Jomo Fisher – I recently posted an sample of calling the Freebase web service with F#. Here’s another F# web service sample. This one uses the Bing Phone API to do a query. This time the code uses Xml instead of JSON and XmlDocument instead of a DataContract...

Jomo Fisher – The web service at Freebase.com lets you access all sorts of structured data from a web service. Here’s a sample that shows you how to access this data from F#. It uses DataContract and the JSON serializer. The code below reads and prints...

Don just put the announcement up: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2010/02/10/announcing-the-f-february-2010-release.aspx This is the version we've been using internally for a month or so and it is really polished and working nicely. Download it...

Jomo Fisher—There is a nice F# and DirectX demo that has been floating around for a while now. A recent version can be found here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/fsharpsamples/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Home&version=2 One of the recent problems we’ve seen...

Jomo Fisher—I’ve enjoyed reading the blog series on F# and game development here . Joh had posted an example of F# of using RK4 and showed some performance numbers comparing F# to C++ and OCaml. Don Syme had been reading too and asked if anyone on the...

Jomo Fisher— Last time I wrote about getting started with F# scripts. They’re the fastest way to just write and run some F#. It’s reasonable to ask whether you can use them to do real work. After all, I just showed a toy example: reversing a linked list...

Jomo Fisher--F# is about conciseness. Consider the interview question that asks you to reverse a singly-linked-list. I’ve been asked this question twice in interviews and even the cleanest implementation in the interviewer’s chosen language was long and...

Jomo Fisher—A while back I wrote about using LINQ to get close-to-the-metal performance in a particular string lookup case in C#. Here, Gustavo Guerra has expanded on the idea significantly with a class he calls StaticStringDicitionary . I haven’t tried...

Jomo Fisher—The F# team has been working furiously on the upcoming release of F# these last weeks. We’ll have some cool stuff to show you soon. Stay tuned.   This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Jomo Fisher—Every once in a while I find I need to turn and assembly name like “System” or “System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089, processorArchitecture=MSIL” into a path to the actual file for that assembly. This...

Correct by Construction in F# Jomo Fisher—a theme in the design of the F# language is that problems in the code are revealed as compilation errors. Consider this C# code which is used to compose a courteous letter to a customer: enum Courtesy {...

Jomo Fisher--Reading one of my favorite blogs this morning--Eric Lippert's Fabulous Adventures in Coding--I came across his article on implementing an immutable queue in C#. The funny thing is that just yesterday I wrote exactly the same structure in...

Jomo Fisher--Luke Hoban wrote something in a blog entry that resonated with me: One of the most striking features of F# code is that it is very terse - ideas can typically be expressed with a small amount of code. Don Syme once mentioned (I'm paraphrasing...

Do you want to help us ship F#? Check out these job postings: Developer: http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=5DF7A6AB-80C5-41CB-9A8D-5B344C33AE1D&start=1&interval=10&SortCol=DatePosted Tester: http://members.microsoft...

Jomo Fisher--Many languages, especially those in the OO vein, require an outermost class to put code in. Usually, good practice requires an enclosing namespace as well. F# allows functions and even function calls in the outermost scope. Here is the minimal...

Jomo Fisher--Here's an interesting problem that some people are having fun with. Don Box posted a naive implementation in C# so I thought I'd post the equivalent in F#: #light open System.Text.RegularExpressions open System.IO open System...