Chris Bowen's Blog : F#

Announcing the F# User Group in Cambridge, MA – April 6

cbowen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:36:56 GMT

Wondering why there’s a buzz around F# and functional programming, and want to know when and how they can be useful? Maybe you’ve already on board with functional programming and want to find others in the same boat?

The new F# User Group (fsug.org) is dedicated to learning and sharing practices around F# and functional programming. The inaugural meeting will be on April 6th from 6:30-8:30 PM at the Microsoft Cambridge facility (aka NERD) [directions].

From the F# User Group site:

6:30pm - 7:00pm   Introduction to F#, Rick Minerich

7:00pm - 7:15pm   Pizza

7:15pm - 8:30pm   F# Coding Dojo (pair program the solution to a problem)

Everyone (complete beginner to expert) is welcome!

Rick (blog here) is extremely knowledgeable about F# and functional programming, and the hands-on dojo component will make for a great meeting to get up to speed. You may have heard that Microsoft is making F# part of .NET and Visual Studio going forward, these meetings will help you understand why this is a good thing.

The June 1st meeting will feature a session by the well-respected technologist and excellent speaker, Richard Hale Shaw.

Sincere thanks to Michael de la Maza, Talbott Crowell and Rick Minerich for bringing a new group to the Boston area! I’m looking forward to this and future meetings!

-Chris

Introductory F# Resources

cbowen — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:08:36 GMT

I recently gave an “Introduction to F#” session for the Cape Cod .NET User group and, with Talbott Crowell for the Boston MSDN Developer Conference.

(And for those of you in Maine, I’ll be delivering the session on February 19th with the Maine Bytes User Group in Portland.)

Here are some resources from the session along with others I hope you’ll find useful as you explore functional programming and F#.

Slides and Samples

Slides - Introduction to F#.pptx
Sample – F Sharp Samples from MSDN Code Gallery
- Contains usage examples, tutorial, solar system (with units of measure), DirectX example, and more
Sample – Async programming by Luca Bolognese

Resources

Videos

Books

“Expert F#”
“Foundations of F#"
“F# for Scientists”
“Real-World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C#” – Not yet released
“F# in a Nutshell” – Not yet released

Products

And, for the curious, a few commercial products written in F#:

I hope you enjoy delving into F#!

-Chris

Speaking on F# with Cape Cod .NET on January 13th

cbowen — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:55:50 GMT

Next Tuesday, January 13th, I'll be visiting Plymouth, MA to give a session on F# programming with the Cape Cod .NET User Group.

From the group's site:

An Introduction to Microsoft F#
Tuesday, January 13, 6:30-8:30 PM

Speaker: Chris Bowen, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft

Location:
Plymouth Public Library, Main Branch, Board Room (second floor)
132 South Street, Plymouth, MA
Directions

In this session, we’ll take an introductory look at Microsoft's new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework that also features Visual Studio integration. F# can make challenging tasks easier by combining functional programming with imperative and dynamic concepts all with the runtime, libraries, tools, and object model of .NET. We’ll also see how F# can tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET. Come and see what this new “first class” .NET language (available as a CTP now and to ship as part of Visual Studio 2010) can offer your development projects.

Thanks to Marcia McLean and Khamla Sananikone for their great work with the Cape Cod group!

See you there!

-Chris

A Guide to the Newly-Released Developer Updates

cbowen — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:35:23 GMT

Though I managed to sneak away for some vacation time this week, it's clearly been a busy time for the product teams. Here's a summary of the recently-released betas and updates with links for more information:

Silverlight

Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate (windows|mac)
Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh (windows|mac)

Details on Tim Sneath's blog.
Here's a useful guide to the Silverlight versions and supporting tools.

Expression

Both include support for Silverlight 1.0 RC.
Details on the Expression Site.

Visual Studio & .NET Framework

Now include "Go Live" license.
Full details in Scott Guthrie's post.
Scott Hanselman (BTW, now a Microsoft employee) has a simplified installation guide.

ASP.NET Futures

ASP.NET Futures July Update

Includes Silverlight support (asp:Media, asp:Xaml), AJAX extensions, application services, dynamic language support, and dynamic data controls.
Soma describes the release on his blog.
More details on Brad Abrams' blog (second half of the post).

Ajax Control Toolkit

AJAX Control Toolkit pdate

Update to support the Beta 2's of VS2008 and .NET 3.5.
Details on Delay's blog.

IronRuby

IronRuby Pre Alpha source preview

John Lam has the details.
Scott Guthrie has a helpful introduction/tutorial.

IronPython

IronPython 2.0 Alpha 3

Dino Viehland's announcement [via PLNews.org]

F#

F# Language v1.9.2.7 release (MSI/Windows | ZIP/Mono)

Don Syme's announcement of v1.9.2.7
Don Syme with the full release notes
F# Overview (i.e. why you may be interested)

Enjoy your explorations!

-Chris

Technorati tags: Silverlight, Expression, Visual Studio, .NET, AJAX, IronRuby, Development, ASP.NET, IronPython, F Sharp