There’s a few stages involved in this:

1. Hooking up the automated feeds
2. Getting classification working
3. Building the page infrastructure
4. Making it look nice

I’m only in stage two right now, but I hope you’ll stay tuned for what comes next.  I’ll be sure to put up a beta site as soon as things are functional.

News

Come and see me and other F# guru’s in Seattle!

“I’m off to Seattle for the MVP summit very soon. I’ve arranged to meet with fellow F# fan’s Cameron Frederick and Richard Minerich at the Tap House Bar in Belleveue at 3:30pm on Sunday.”

More WebSharper talks in February

“It’s almost March, but don’t rush time – there are still two (edit – three!) upcoming WebSharper talks before the end of February”

WANTED F# Developers – Investment Banking – All experience levels considered

“** Do you have development experience in functional programming? ** Have you used F# commercially or in your spare time? ** Do you want to work for a team of industry leading technologists?”

Tools

SEO Reporter – open search engine optimization software

“SEO Reporter is an open source search engine optimization application for detecting HTML related SEO violations, gathering data about a Web page and analyzing its keywords strategy. It’s a Windows navigation application developed in F# that features a fast agent-based Web crawler”

Phillip Trelford’s Cellz Released

“Cellz is an Open Source functional .Net Silverlight Spreadsheet application written in F# and published on CodePlex.”

FAKE 1.46.0.0 with MSpec and NuGet support released

“Today I released a new “Fake – F# Make” version with initial support for machine.specifications (MSpec) and fixed some NuGet problems incl. support for automatic push to the http://nuget.org/ feed.”

Machine.Fakes 0.1.0.0 released – Built with "FAKE – F# Make" 1.50.1.0

“Today he released version 0.1.0.0 (get it from nuget.org) and I want to talk a bit about the build process. Björn and myself thought a tool called “Machine.Fakes” should of course be built with a tool called “FAKE – F# Make”. In order to do so I had to fix some stuff in Fake which resulted in the new Fake version 1.50.1.0.”

General

Whither F#?

“At that point, functional programming will have a real story to tell. If this comes to pass, it’ll happen soon, I expect. And with F#, Microsoft developers will have a ready tool.”

Yin Zhu’s Support vector machines (SVMs) in F# using Microsoft Solver Foundation

“Support vector machines are a super star in machine learning and data mining in the past decade. It reheats statistical learning in machine learning community. It is also one of the classifiers that work practically with applications to other disciplines such as bioinformatics.”

Daniel Mohl’s Creating the FSPowerPack.Community NuGet Package

“I’m hoping that this is the start to a significant increase in the number of F#-related packages available on the NuGet Gallery. With this goal in mind, I decided to post the steps that were taken to create the FSPowerPack.Community package along with a few helpful hints that may reduce some Googling as you go down the path of creating your first package.”

Chris Marinos’s F# on (Ubuntu) Linux with Mono and Monodevelop

“Below is the process that I used to get everything working on my machine. I don’t claim that this is the best way to do things or that it will even work for anyone else. However, I didn’t find much up to date documentation on the web about running F# on Ubuntu, so hopefully this useful to others. I’ll do my best to keep this up to date, so feel free to post comments on your experiences.”

Matthew Moloney’s Plotting the running mean and standard deviation in Rx, F#, and WPF

“In this project I examine the use of Rx and F# for creating interactive charts. Such charting would be useful for all kinds of monitoring operations; from the status of a compute clusters to the movement of the stock markets.”

Matthew Moloney’s Building a simple Directed WebCrawler in Rx and F#

“In parallel programming, fork join operations take a list of functions, perform them in parallel, and then join the results. The results are only returned when all functions have finished. For a crawler, a single request can take a very long period of time, blocking the join operation. In Rx, the merge operator merges the results into a single stream as they arrive – no blocking involved.”

Steve Gilham’s ILSpy and F#

“Suddenly a new contender in the post-Reflector age — ILSpy, emerging from the SharpDevelop stable. So I decided to give it a whirl with the same F# code as with the simple tests I made last week with Cecil.Decompiler — a few extension methods for Option”

Steve Gilham’s Mono 2.10, XBuild, F# — first attempts

“Following the announcement that F# and the Iron languages are being bundled with Mono 2.10 for Mac and Linux, I thought it worth taking the system for a spin on Windows as well. This is a record of my experiments, and are nowhere near a complete HOW-TO as yet (they more closely resemble a HOW NOT TO at the moment).”

Bohdan Szymanik’s Multiple Monitoring Performance Data Collections

“I wrote in the last couple of posts on how to retrieve that data using F# and Sho needs a little adjusting to concatenate the collections into one sequence – yield! works great in F#”

Community

Stack Overflow – Small difference in types

“Why do the types of these methods differ?”

News

F# share of UK job market triples in four months

“More job adverts now mention F# than any other functional programming language, including OCaml, Haskell and even Scala.”

fpound.net launched.

“fpound.net is an independent community site by and for F# programmers.” – Programmers from ##fsharp on irc.freenode.net in fact.

Video

Tomas Petricek on Teaching F#: From numerical expressions to 3D graphics

“One of the key concepts of functional programming is compositionality – the fact that we can build complex software using several basic “building blocks” and just a few ways of combining them.”

Tools

F# Intellisense in Emacs – in progress

“I have made an experimental prototype of F# Intellisense in Emacs. Results are very encouraging, and I believe current limitations could be fixed quickly.”

FsUnit Now On NuGet Gallery

“The version 0.9.0 of the FsUnit NuGet package pulls down NUnit and FsUnit 0.9.0, adds the appropriate references to the designated project, and puts in an fs source file with a simple example of a class and a few tests.”

Version 1.1 of the F# ASP.NET MVC 3 Template

“A new version (1.1) of the F# ASP.NET MVC 3 Template is now available on Visual Studio Gallery. This version primarily fixes a few bugs that have been reported.”

WebSharper 2.1 Beta 5 available

“Today we are happy to announce WebSharper 2.1 Beta 5, with substantial new features and a major redesign of WebSharper sitelets, among others. Now with all major features in place and available, we are ramping up to ship the final WebSharper 2.x Professional in the coming weeks.”

Articles

Ambar Ray’s Dynamic Data – Pattern Matching Database Records with F#

“There are four common matching algorithms used for attribute deduplication processes: absolute match, partial match, Soundex and lookup match. These algorithms can be run against the data and, once the percentage match score is computed, you can decide whether to discard or store the data.”

Robert Pickering’s Windows Phone 7 Accelerometer and F#

“Recently I’ve doing a little work with Windows Phone 7. One aspect that interests me a lot is the integration of the Accelerometer.”

Yin Zhu’s Logistic Regression in F# using Microsoft Solver Foundation

“Logistic regression is a workhorse in data mining. Like decision trees and SVMs, it is a very standard classifier. If you have a labeled data, logistic regression definitely is one of the classifiers that should tried.”

Ashley Feniello’s : LOOPTY DO I . LOOP ;

“There’s beginning to be more Forth than F# in these posts! The last major piece we’re missing in the language, aside from some compile-time trickery we’ll get into later, is the standard Forth looping constructs.”

Ashley Feniello’s IF … ELSE … THEN

“Sadly (or happily), we’ve come to a point at which we need to begin thinking like an assembly programmer in order to appreciate the mechanics of Forth’s control flow words.”

Ashley Feniello’s VARIABLE X

“We’re getting very close to the point at which we’ll need to start moving closer to the machine with things like direct memory access.”

Alexander Rautenberg’s F#/FsYacc: Processing the Syntax Tree in C#, Part 1

“The F# PowerPack comes with the FsLex and FsYacc tools that make it quite easy to create a parser for domain-specific languages, or just to parse the contents of complex text files. A previous post had an example that took the contents of a spread sheet cell and converted it into an abstract syntax tree (AST) and also some code to walk that AST to produce a string representation that closely resembled Lisp syntax.”

Amund Tveit’s An example of using F# and C# (.net/mono) with Amazon’s Elastic Mapreduce (Hadoop)

“This posting gives an example with a C# (c sharp) mapper function and a F# (f sharp) reducer function with description on how to deploy the job on Amazon’s Elastic Mapreduce using bootstrap action.”

Yin Zhu’s Introducing Sho and using its libraries from F#

“The following is a sample F# script showing how to use Sho library in F#.”

Steve Gilham’s Cecil.Decompiler and F#

“In this new post-Reflector age, I thought I’d have a look-see how the main competition worked on F#. So I whipped up a simple driver for Cecil.Decompiler:”

Steve Gilham’s Scripting the Win32 API – F# and IronPython FFI

“Mainly a worked example for reminding me of how the syntax goes, reimplementing sn -k in F# and IronPython”

Steve Gilham’s Getting the public key and token from a strong-name key

“I hope we’re all familiar with sn -Tp to get the public key details from an assembly — here using an example where the key is public and anyone can reproduce the results”

Anton Tayanovskyy’s Home-made Regular Expressions in F#: Thompson NFA

“Russ Cox re-discovered and popularized an old (originating in a 1968 paper by Thompson) technique for implementing regular expressions. The article offers a wonderfully simple to understand presentation, and I just could not resist trying it in F#.”

Bohdan Szymanik’s SCOM data into F#

“Having just discovered how to get SCOM data from Microsoft Sho – a dynamic language analysis environment – I thought I’d try from F#”

Johann Deneux’s F# for game development: Death by exception

“The definitive solution requires all clean-up code to be located in finally blocks, or in Dispose methods of IDisposable objects bound with "use" or "using". That’s where all clean-up code should be anyway.”

Johann Deneux’s Game state management using cooperative multitasking

“The game state management sample on the App Hub shows how to organize a game in screens. I strongly recommend all new-comers to game programming to study it, regardless of their amount of programming experience.”

Johann Deneux’s Post-asteroid trauma

“I am not done yet with project templates. I am planning to make a full game template for the Xbox 360, and update all existing templates with the script for interactive development using fsi.”

Joel Bjornson’s Creating a user sign-up form using WebSharper Formlets

“In this post I’ll highlight some of the features of WebSharper formlets by implementing a user sign-up form.”

Keith Dahlby’s F# + Razor View Engine = FSRazor

“Last month InfoQ posted some info from the ASP.NET team about using F# with the new Razor view engine. It seemed like it should be pretty simple, so I thought I’d give it a shot. My (very rough) progress so far is available on GitHub”

Neil Carrier’s My Dinner with Haskell

“It’s impossible to go very far into either the F# world or the world of domain-specific languages (DSLs) without encountering Haskell. It seems like all the F# gurus are also Haskell gurus, or at least Haskell aficionados, and a lot of people use Haskell for prototyping new languages (including DSLs).”

Richard Minerich’s The Road to Functional Programming in F# – From Imperative to Computation Expressions

“In F# there are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the style in which you will perform a computation. ”

Richard Minerich’s F# Code and Slides to Share

“As I mentioned in my most recent edition of F# Discoveries This Week, it’s Code Camp season and it would be great to see more F# users out there sharing the love.”

Tomas Petricek’s F# in MonoDevelop Slides 

“I CAN HAS F#$@ IN MONODEVELOP?”

Mauricio Scheffer’s Validation in formlets

“So far, if someone entered an unexpected value in our little implementation of formlets (e.g. "abc" in an int Formlet), we’d get a nasty exception and there wasn’t much we could do about it because we couldn’t trace the exception to the formlet that was producing it.”

Scott Phillip Brown’s Conway’s Game of Life with F# and SDL.NET

“This is an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using F# and SDL.NET.”

Physics simulation overview (an F# tutorial)

“Physics engines are known to be arcane black box components in game development. To the point that the necessity of the most popular engine, Box2d’s, horrid API is not questioned. Leaving it to remain the most popular.”

Community

Stack Overflow: F# Quotations – traversing into function calls represented by a Value – Stack Overflow

“I’ve spent a few hours trying to get to grips with F# Quotations, but I’ve come across a bit of a road block.”

Just think of all those poor C# and VB devs sitting bored at their desks and how much happier they’d be writing awesome functional code.  Feel free to grab, tweak and use any any of the slides and materials from my previous talks.  With just a little effort you can end the suffering. 

News

Zachary Shaw on Agent Based Models at The New England F# User Group’s February 2011 Meeting (Feb 7th at 6:30pm EST)

“What are Agent Based Models? Can I see an example? How about an example in a functional language? How about the same example in an OO language? Oh, can we compare them?”

The Community For F#’s February 2011 Live Meeting with Tomas Petricek (Feb 15th at 12:00 PST)

“We’ll start with a basic example of this approach that even high-school students can easily understand – numerical expressions. Then we’ll move to more exciting examples of using library for composing 3D graphics. We’ll see that creating a fractal tree is not much more complicated than calculating the area of a triangle.”

F# Team Contract Position in Cambridge UK

“This includes developing concepts and demonstrators of using F# to solve real-world issues in cloud computing, with applications to financial programming, technical computing and web programming.”

General

Ashley Feniello’s FORTH LOVE? IF HONK THEN (Part 1)

“Forth, like Lisp, is not really a language as much as it is an idea with many dialects. To make it even more confusing, Forth is also a development environment (editor, compiler, assembler) and, in many cases, even stands alone as an operating system (device drivers, file system, …) and is a software design philosophy.”

Ashley Feniello’s : HELLO FORTH WORLD ; (Part 2)

“One of the difficulties in explaining how the machinery of Forth works is that so many of the pieces are intertwined and can’t be explained independently. Forth has an interesting approach that rolls the interactive, the tokenizer/parser and compiler into a single intricately choreographed dance.”

Ashley Feniello’s : REFACTOR FAT TRIM BUILD ; (Part 3)

“As we go along, I think you’ll be amazed by just how little it takes to bootstrap a Forth system. Also, with just a few more primitives we can really start to build things up.”

Jon Harrop’s F# vs Mathematica: parametric plots

“Another example from Sal Mangano’s Mathematica Cookbook (p.520) is an elegant little Mathematica program that uses a crude numerical integrator to plot the trajectory of a differential equation representing the populations of predators (foxes) and prey (rabbits)”

Johann Deneux’s Safe IO on the Xbox 360 in F#

“Attempting to use the XNA API as it is almost invariably leads to bugs. I would say storage-related crashes are among the top 3 reasons games fail peer review. EasyStorage is a popular C# component that simplifies safe IO in games. In this article, I describe an alternative component written in F#.”

Brian McNamara’s Gotcha explained

“I see people occasionally stumble on this in a variety of ways; the fact that F# property getter syntax (and overall syntax) is so succinct makes it easier to forget that the body of the member is code that will run each time the member is referenced.  One-time initialization should be moved to the constructor (the let/do section prior to the members; see this blog for a primer on the F# class/interface syntax).”

Mauricio Scheffer’s A factored implementation of formlets in F#

“Factoring formlets like this not only has the advantage of producing cleaner code, but also enables the reusability of each applicative functor and extending formlets more easily, as we’ll see in a future post.”

Anton Tayanovskyy’s WebSharper Sitelets Cont’d: Developing a Blog Service

“In fact, the user-defined Action type can be an arbitrary data structure that maps to a URL. This comes particularly handy when designing a blogging website, since the set of blogs and their URLs is not statically bounded.”

Phillip Trelford’s Functional Style BDD Steps

“Could a BDD framework be implemented simply as a fold over a sequence of lines in a document?”

Dave Thomas’s Sockets and Bockets Part 1

“However thats not the end of the story, a lot of memory fragmentation can occur using the APM model when there is a high throughput, so I thought I would see if I could take this a step further…”

Dave Thomas’s Sockets and Bockets Part 2

“When you look at the method syntax for the xxxAsync methods you will notice they return a boolean value that indicates if the method completed synchronously, this means that you have to check the return value every time you use one of the methods and invoke the callback yourself if it completes synchronously.  In practice this hardly ever happens, and normally only on a send operation.”

Dave Thomas’s Sockets and Bockets Part 3

“As promised heres a description of the inner workings.  I’m sick to death of typing SocketAsyncEventArgs so from now on I will refer to it as SAEA.”

Dave Thomas’s Sockets and Bockets Part 4

“If you are like me and like looking at graphs and stats and digging in deeper into the code then your going to enjoy this”

Dave Thomas’s Pipeline processing 1

“In essence its a way of dealing with complexity and its also a way of breaking down a process into separate tasks of a similar size.  If they are used correctly then pipelines can be used to increase the overall throughput of a system.”

Community

Stack Exchange – What’s new in purely functional data structures since Okasaki?

FsSnip – Plotting using Chart Control

That leaves us with the question: how will we find time to try all of this great new stuff?

News

Functional Programming eXchange 2011, London, March 18, 2011

“In a previous blog post I mentioned Simon Cousins and his explanation of why F# programming was effective for his recent enterprise work.”

Please Submit Content/Feedback on the F# MSDN Docs

“The MSDN docs for F# are a primary learning and reference point for much of the language and the F# library.

We really do value & read fedback on the MSDN docs, so please do take the time to tell us how the docs can be made. You can submit feedback in a number of ways”

The F# Team Are Hiring! Come and be the Senior Program Manager for F#

“The Visual Studio Pro team is looking for an experienced Program Manager to drive the F# area. Partnering with your engineering team in Redmond and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, you will define the F# developer experience for Visual Studio and out of band releases such as the F# PowerPack.”

Tools

Tim Robinson’s Try F#

“Try F# in your web browser. Type some F# code and press Send.”

VSLab for VS2010 Released!

“Visual Studio Lab (VSLab) exploits the power of F# and its interactive top level to provide an interactive environment similar to MatLab and Mathematica, in which you can easily create Add-ins and interact dynamically with them inside Visual Studio”

NuGet now has F# support

“NuGet (formerly known as NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.”

Daniel Mohl’s FSRepository – A New NuGet Package

“A new NuGet package is now available in the NuGet gallery called FSRepository. This package adds a few F# source files and assembly references to your F# project so that EFCodeFirst 0.8 can be used for data access.”

Daniel Mohl’s New F# ASP.NET MVC 3 Template on Visual Studio Gallery

“There is a new F# ASP.NET MVC 3 project template on Visual Studio Gallery. This template is a version of the F# ASP.NET MVC 2 project template that has been migrated to ASP.NET MVC 3.”

Daniel Mohl’s New F# Empty Web Application (Silverlight) Template

“There is a new F# Silverlight application template up on Visual Studio Gallery that generates an "empty" Silverlight solution. The generated solution provides the necessary structure to start F# Silverlight development, but does not include any sample code.”

Johann Deneux‘s F# library for Xbox 360 (XNA GS 4.0)

“This project template gets you ready to write games for the Xbox 360 in F#, using the XNA Game Studio framework.”

General

Phillip Trelford’s Cucumber style BDD Step Definitions with F#

“Using a BDD framework, scenario specifications can be automated as acceptance tests, thereby creating living documentation that is in sync with the code.”

Anton Tayanovskyy’s WebSharper sitelets: building a two-page website

“Let me show the simplest possible self-contained example involving WebSharper sitelets that are coming with the 2.1 release”

Jon Harrop’s Gradient descent

“One of the most popular questions we receive about the old book F# for Scientists is how the gradient descent example can be rewritten to work with the current version of F# in Visual Studio 2010 rather than the early prototype covered in the book, running under Visual Studio 2005.”

Johann Deneux’s Cooperative multitasking using the Eventually workflow

“In cooperative multitasking at most one task executes at any time. In order for another task to execute, the task currently in control must explicitly pause itself. The scheduler keeps track of which task is executing, which tasks are ready to be executed and which are blocked or sleeping.”

Johann Deneux’s How to spread a computation over multiple update cycles

“Let us consider a simple example: We want to implement an animation effect which can be used for "press start screens", among other things. The animation can be decomposed into three phases:”

Alexander Rautenberg’s Transportation Algorithm in F#, Part 2

“After having had a look at the algorithm in the last post, here is some F# code to implement it. Please not that all the source files are on CodePlex, and it may be of help to download and run that project in Visual Studio and with some strategically placed breakpoints.”

Gordon Hogenson’s F# agents with timeouts

“Where I’m headed with this, is I want to create a job agent that will allow me to start some background jobs from a command prompt.  The timeout isn’t really necessary, but it did help clarify the behavior of exceptions that take place in the message loop.”

Kevin Hazzard’s F# Talk at CodeMash 2011

“Here are the slides and code from my F# talk at CodeMash 2011 entitled “What the Math Geeks Don’t Want You to Know about F#”

Taha’s Extracting keywords from a Web page

“The occurrence and density of a keyword in a Web page indicates its relevance to a certain theme. A page that contains the keyword "organic" 212 times, the keyword "food" 132 times and the combination "organic food" 55 times would be relevant from a search engine point of view for queries that involve these keywords.”

Taha’s Web Crawling with networked Agents

“A single agent waits for URLs and starts the links collection computation. The code below achieves the same scalability and control objectives at a higher level of abstraction thanks to a network of communicating agents.”

Stefano Ricciardi’s Project Euler Problem 18 in F#

“This problem is easily solved resorting to dynamic programming, which we can loosely describe as decomposing the overall problem into easier sub-problems and combining their solutions to find the final answer.”

Community

How to write a function for generic numbers? – Stack Overflow

“I’m quite new to F# and find type inference really is a cool thing. But currently it seems that it also may lead to code duplication, which is not a cool thing. I want to sum the digits of a number like this:”

News

Research Positions at Microsoft Research, Cambridge

“Do you have what it takes to join the lab that helped produce the AI vision algorithms for XBox Kinect, which has already sold more than 8 million units?”

The San Francisco Bay Area F# User Group, Jan 11 – Map Reduce, F# and Azure: Using Big Data Techniques to Parse Logs

“The next meetup is on January 11, with Noah Gift speaking on a great topic: Map Reduce, F# and Azure: Using Big Data Techniques to Parse Logs”

Morgan Stanley’s own Jeffry Borror will be teaching F# for Non-Functional Programmers at the NYC F# User Group on 1/19 and 1/20.

“This two day session is your opportunity to get over that initial F# learning curve and be better prepared for some of the more advanced topics which will be coming soon. I hope to see you there!”

Scott Theleman is speaking at the New England F# User Group on 1/10.

“Scott will continue last month’s dual code kata – Windows Phone 7 and Poker Strategies in F#! Bring your laptop loaded with Windows Phone 7 tools. Or bring your laptop with F# and pit your Poker strategies against other F#ers.”

Audio and Video

Haim Michael’s Using Streams in F# PRO

“If you are already familiar with the usage of streams in C# you will have no difficulty learning how to do the same when coding in F#.”

Haim Michael’s Generics in F# PRO

“I have just completed to develop the 7th topic in my on going course for learning F#. It covers the usage of generics and among other sub topics it explains how to define a generic class and how to define a generic function”

Tools

Tim Robinson’s Try F#

“Try F# in your web browser. Type some F# code and press Send.”

WebSharper Beta 4 released

“Happy new year folks, we just rolled out the WebSharper 2.0 Beta4 release – with an enhanced installer and better support for sitelet-based development with some significant performance improvements.”

FSharpJump – a Visual Studio 2010 Extension for F# Outlining and Navigation

“Here is such an extension that you can add to VS 2010. The extension uses the new VSIX extension mechanism that became available in VS 2010.”

General

Jon Harrop’s Performance-related features in F# and C#

“Many people expect the performance of F# to be comparable to the performance of C# "because they both compile to the same intermediate language (CIL)". Although the VM obviously places the same ceiling on the performance of both F# and C# there are some features that affect performance differently between the two language implementations.”

Phillip Trelford’s Lunar Landurz

“Below is a playable Silverlight mini-game that applies units of measures in F# to 2D game mechanics.”

Phillip Trelford’s Light Cycles

“The game is about as simple as they come weighing in at just under 200 lines of code. For fun I’ve ported it over to Silverlight:”

Ade Miller’s Using CUDA/Thrust with the Parallel Patterns Library

“I’ve been working on getting my CUDA/Thrust N-body code working with multiple GPUs. The following is a quick code spike showing how to use the Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) to create a task for each CUDA device and execute a CUDA kernel on it using the Thrust library for CUDA.”

F# zipper with pipe forward

“The pipe forward operator combined with the navigation and modification functions produces a nicely readable line of code that traverses and produces an altered tree. The original tree is also unmodified as this is purely functional code.”

F# and XBuild (Debian)

“Since some folks from ##fsharp on irc.freenode.net requsted it, I’m going to put up the stuff I actually remember about getting F# on Linux/Mono to compile under XBuild.”

Brian Reiter’s Is F# Math Really Faster than C#?

“I ran across an article claiming that F# was about an order of magnitude faster at calculating a basic math algorithm. Can this be true?”

Mauricio Scheffer’s Parsing with applicative functors in F#

“To show an example of this, I’ll borrow an example from the book "Real World Haskell" (RWH): parsing an URL-encoded query string.”

Jon Harrop’s Patterns are everywhere!

“When people first learn languages from the ML family, like F#, they often mistakenly assume that patterns appear only in match or function expressions. In fact, patterns also appear on the left-hand-side of let-bound definitions.”

Jon Harrop’s IO throughput: Haskell vs F#

“Many applications require the ability to churn through gigabytes of data. In such cases, high IO throughput is valuable. This article examines high-throughput IO in the Haskell and F# programming languages.”

Bartosz Milewski’s Using F#: Sequences and Pipelines

“In particular, I was interested in finding duplicate image files, but for testing I used text files. The program should therefore concentrate on files with particular extensions. It should also be able to skip directories that I’m not interested in.”

Untying the game update loop

“In a video game, what do the menu system, an AI agent and an animated HUD component have in common? They are all a pain in the neck to implement over the game update loop.”

Kurt Schelfthout’s F# projects someone should start

“Some ideas for projects that would scratch a few itches I have. However it’s unlikely that I’ll ever have to time to actually get round to doing them myself, so by blogging about them I hope someone who is looking for ideas can pick one of these up and make them real. Hope there is some room after New Year’s resolutions!”

Welcome to Gordon Hogenson’s F# Blog

“I’m the technical writer who wrote most of the MSDN documentation for F#, and I decided to start a less formal channel of communication to share some of what I’m learning about F# and associated technologies.”

Community

Stack Overflow – F# List SelectMany

“Is there any Seq/List operation in F# to match the LINQ SelectMany?”

hubFS – Collatz conjecture, memoization, and continuations

“So I was attempting to solve a problem with a solution that was simple enough as long as you memoized the results. I was looking for a particular number whos Collatz length has a specific property. Solving this problem recursively would be very unkind to you stack, unless you use continuations.”

Best of all, we’ve been active participants in the rise of a new class of uber-geek in the Microsoft world: the F# user.  With the power of types we go forth writing tiny snippets of rock solid code that leave pages upon pages of C# obsolete.  Even the most stalwart C++ user must be envious.

I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us next year!

News

2010: A Year of Peerless Accomplishment

“From its inception in 1991, Microsoft Research has hewed to a remarkably unwavering mission. Its tenets are threefold: to invest in basic research to advance the state of the art in computer science, to transfer technologies into Microsoft products when appropriate, and to collaborate openly with the scientific community.”

Interested in F# in the Washington DC area?

“I’ve had some contacts from interested F# users in DC about the possibility of setting up a user group in the area.”

F#/Functional job with the Health Sciences team at Microsoft

“The health sciences team at Microsoft, in collaboration with Microsoft Research, is looking for a key designer/engineer on our team, responsible for significant architecture investments in a challenging and creative environment.”

Audio and Video

Haim Michael’s Collections in F# PRO

“I have just completed to develop the 4th topic (of my on going F# Fundamentals course) that covers the usage of collections in F#.”

Tools

WebSharper 2.0 Beta Bundle

“It’s never been easier to get started with WebSharper 2.0 – now with a single installer that contains six WebSharper project templates for Visual Studio, including integration with ASP.NET, MVC, and Sitelets. Go and grab your installer (renumbered as a bundle, current latest 2.0.21) at the WebSharper Downloads page.”

MonoDevelop is the Third IDE for F#

“MonoDevelop has become the third IDE to support Microsoft’s F# language. With .NET support essentially dead on the Eclipse IDE and WebMatrix being targeted for causal developers, it is likely to be the last IDE to add support for it in the foreseeable future.”

Project templates for F# games, libraries and applications on Windows Phone 7 using XNA

“Johann Deneux and Giuseppe Maggiore have been putting together templates for F# games, libraries and applications for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) XNA. This extends Dan Mohl’s great work on templates for list, panorama and vanilla applications.”

General

Steve Gilham’s Distributed Memory: “Hello, OTP!” from F#

“This is all building on the original work done elsewhere Integrating .NET and Erlang using OTP.NET and Integrating F# and Erlang Using OTP.NET, as a little bit of a five-finger exercise using the OTP framework as now explained in Erlang and OTP in Action.”

Steve Gilham’s “Hello, OTP!” from F# revisited

“That previous F# code was just too ugly to leave as it was; so after a little bit of work, I’ve factored out a general purpose wrapper to convert the Otp.Erlang types into values of a discriminated union on the F# side of the fence.”

Steve Gilham’s F# GUI plumbing with reactive Events

“My most recent “Aha!” moment with the language is to finally wrap my head around the standard Event module — a sort of lightweight subset of the Reactive Extensions for .net”

Mauricio Scheffer’s Zipping with applicative functors in F#

“In my last post I briefly described functors from a F# perspective. Now it’s the turn of applicative functors. Since there were few to none concrete examples in my previous post, this time I’ll start with an example.”

Mauricio Scheffer’s Notes on Haskell functors and F#

“I’ve been learning a bit of Haskell lately, and I wanted to share some of what I have learned so far, from a F# perspective.”

Steffen Forkmann’s Compute Fib(n) in O(log n)

“Today I learned a neat way to compute the n.th Fibonacci number in O(log n) time. The idea is that we can compute the Fibonacci Q-Matrix in O(log n) by using recursive powering”

Joh’s Interactive game development with FSI and XNA

“I recently looked at a presentation by Don Syme about the future of F# and type providers. The entire demo was conducted using F# interactive and a Windows Forms. The same can be done for XNA. First, you need to get the code sample that shows how to embed XNA into a Windows Forms control. It’s available in the education catalog on the App hub.”

Joh’s How to make a visual studio project template

“Here is the simple 14-step procedure to build a template for F# projects targeting exotic platforms.”

Jon Harrop’s Performance-related features in F# and C#

“Many people expect the performance of F# to be comparable to the performance of C# “because they both compile to the same intermediate language (CIL)”. Although the VM obviously places the same ceiling on the performance of both F# and C# there are some features that affect performance differently between the two language implementations.”

Adam Granicz’s Visual Studio book with F# chapter

“The book covers a great deal about .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010, and has a ~75 page F# chapter at the end for your reading pleasure (this is the part I wrote). As with any book, there may be errors and omissions, if you find any we kindly ask you to send your errata to Wrox.”

F#, xUnit theories and InlineData

“Anyway, just a short heads up to save people some time: in the xUnit extensions, there is a Theory attribute which in combination with the InlineData attribute lets you specify a parameterized xUnit test.”

Exact Cover In Solving Sudokus

“I would finally understand how the Sudoku – solving technique works, and found an article on the Exact Cover problem in relation to Sudoku, a Sudoku solver in F # version and a version of Haskell .”

Guide to F#

“F# is the only language to be added to Visual Studio for a very long time. What makes it so special?”

Community

StackExchange: Real world pitfalls of introducing F# into a large codebase and engineering team

“I’m CTO of a software firm with a large existing codebase (all C#) and a sizable engineering team. I can see how certain parts of the code would be far easier to write in F#, resulting in faster development time, fewer bugs, easier parallel implementations, etc., basically overall productivity gains for my team. However, I can also see several productivity pitfalls of introducing F#, namely:”

The Code Project: Optimize references in closures in F#

“This quick tip shows how to encode a closure as a class in the F# programming language. The advantage is that references are stored as mutable fields in the class, thus removing a level of indirection.”

FsSnip: Break sequence into n-element subsequences

“I’m working on parallel computations and I thought it would be useful to break work into chunks, especially when processing each element asynchronously is too expensive.”

News

Tomas Petricek’s Announcing F# snippets web site

“Now that I have a twitter (follow me if you don’t already) I thought I could just post the snippet somewhere, but there was no good web site for posting F# snippets – until now!”

The F# Compiler on GitHub

“This is the F# compiler and core library for Mono, based on the F# Powerpack code drop under the OSS approved Apache 2.0 license.”

Audio and Video

Arrays in F# PRO

“I have recently completed to develop a new topic in my on going F# Fundamentals course. This new topic covers the possibilities we have when working with arrays in F#. In addition, it showcases the available language constructs that enable us to get a shorter code comparing with C# (for doing the same operations).”

Editing F# code in VS2010 (and many more videos)

“This video demonstrates using a number of Visual Studio editing features for F#, including customizing syntax highlighting colors, Intellisense for auto-completion, error squiggles, type inference tooltips, and various source code navigation features.”

Tools

F# Refactor

“Deisgned to bring Code Refactoring capabilities to the F# Language in Visual Studio 2010.”

Refunctor

“The project is still under development. As of now, You can try F# interactive inside Reflector. Program editor will be added later.  ”

WebSharper 2.0 Beta 2 released

“We just released a new WebSharper 2.0 Beta (2.0.63) and a matching WebSharper Manager (2.0.10) – please go to the WebSharper Download Page to grab the new binaries.”

FSharpXmlDoc

“Automatically create F# xmldoc template when you type ///”

F# Colorizer Editor

“If you are loving and learning F# like me, you may know about the awesome F# Deep Colorizer VS Extension implemented by Brian McNamara.The extension uses background colorization of the Visual Studio’s Code Editor to show the “control flow depth” of F# code.”

F# PowerPack, with F# Compiler Source Drops Has been updated.

“F# PowerPack, with F# Compiler Source Drops Has been updated.”

General

A Modern Approach to an Ancient Game

“When it comes to the ancient Chinese board game of Go, a certain cliché has gained near ubiquity. The game, the saying goes, takes just minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master”

Phillip Trelford’s Invadurz

“The game was developed in F# using the freely available Visual Studio 2010 Shell and targets Silverlight 4”

Phillip Trelford’s Fractal Zoom

“Time for a makeover with a sprinkling of Active patterns, Reactive programming, Parallel execution and Silverlight.”

Phillip Trelford’s Silverlife

“I’ve managed to increase Jon’s example to a massive 50 lines but at the same time get it running in Silverlight. If you have Silverlight 4 installed you can click in the box below to kick start life.”

Phillip Trelford’s Missile Command

“Just for fun, a clone of the 1980s arcade game Missile Command written in F# and deployed in Silverlight.”

Richard Minerich’s An F# Ant Colony Simulation in Silverlight 4.0 with Dynamic AI Loading

“I’ve been enviously watching Phillip Trelford publish excellent F# games all week and tonight I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  I stayed in, rolled up my sleeves and ported the very same ant colony simulation I used in my CUFP workshop to Silverlight 4.0.”

Robert Pickering’s Solving Sudoku Puzzles using F# and Microsoft Solver Foundation

“While I knew that solving Sudoku in F# wasn’t particularly an original idea, Jon Harrop has a custom Sudoku solver in F# that dates back to 2007, but I thought using Solver Foundation might be an interesting approach.”

Steffen Forkmann’s Sudoku solver in F#

“On my flight to the US I had a small competition with my dad. He was solving a Sudoku and I tried to write a generic solver in the same time.”

Jon Harrop’s Parsing mathematical expressions using active patterns

“Active patterns allow arbitrary user-defined functions to be used to dissect values during pattern matching. This opens up some interesting possibilities with regard to parsing because it allows active patterns to be used to destructure streams of data when known patterns are encountered.”

Joh’s On the performance of F# on the Xbox 360

“In an attempt to answer this question, I am comparing in this article the performance of four implementations of an octree: Two in F# and two in C#.”

Adam Granicz’s Introducing WebSharper 2.0 at LWSUG

“Earlier this week I gave a talk at the first London WebSharper User Group meetup about WebSharper 2.0 and some of its new features such as sitelets and the new Visual Studio templates. This was a longer, class-like talk with many technical points discussed – a great source of information for anyone interested in WebSharper. Here is the short summary of the talk:”

Scraping Links from HTML

“Extracting links from HTML is a bit tricky. The two main issues are relative URLs and the lack of canonicalization (the process of consistently using the same URL pattern for internal links across the hole Web site).”

Getting started with formlets

“In this tutorial you will learn how to create a newsletter sign-up form using WebSharper formlets.”

Frederick Times’ What Protovis might look like through an F# Lens

“Since I love F# and data visualizations I thought to myself that it might be cool to have a Protovis style API for the Charting controls. So I started hacking and surprisingly came up with the following  F# Script :”

Nicholas Cloud’s Getting a Clue with F#

“As a fun project, I decided to implement a guessing strategy for the popular board game Clue, as proposed by Wired magazine in a recent article about teen “mathletes”:”

Stefano Ricciardi’s Project Euler Problem 16 in F#

“I have tried to found an elegant way to solve this problem at a mathematical level, but I couldn’t gain any insight relating powers of 2 to their representation in base 10 (I’d love to know if such a thing exists). Therefore I resorted to solve this problem with brute force.”

Stefano Ricciardi’s Project Euler Problem 17 in F#

“Project Euler problem 17 turned out to be quite an easy one”

Rey Dacoco’s Example 18: Race to Ren Text-Based Game

“Problem: Make a simple Race to Ten text-based game.”

Youhei Kondou’s Studying F# : Local Calendars

“One of the most useful features in .NET/CLR is supporting not only Gregorian calendar but also many local calendars. For me, it is awesome that there is the Japanese Calendar (in Japanese : 和暦 / pronounce “wareki”).”

Brian’s US Federal Holidays in F#

“Here’s how to determine whether a date is a US federal holiday using F#. You probably want to curry the first two boolean parameters with the appropriate settings (some departments observe Sunday holidays on Monday, and some observe Saturday holidays on Friday).”

Mikael Lundin’s Generate machine keys with F#

“This is how I use F# to generate the keys.”

Writing .NET TBB’s in F#

“I rewrote a C# .NET Template Building Block for an SDL Tridion project in F# as a test to see how well F# fit in real-world applications.”

Richard Minerich’s I got 99 problems but dynamic ain’t one

“If you got runtime errors I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but dynamic ain’t one”

Community

HubFS – Permutation Generation in F-Sharp

“I had fun writing a generator of permutations in f-sharp. I posted a writeup about it on my blog here.  I welcome any tips on how to improve this code”

StackOverflow – Map Reduce with F# agents

“After playing with F# agents I tried to do a map reduce using them.”

Welcome back F# Fans!  While you’ve been busy trying to make holiday shopping lists the F# community has been busy creating great content.  It just goes to show how addictive functional programming can be.

Also, I’m proud to say that we have reached 70 people signed up for the first meeting of our NYC F# User Group tomorrow!  Howard has a great demo in store for you guys, it’s sure to be a crowd pleaser. 

On another note, please let me know if you’re interested in coming out to the area to speak for a future meeting.  We are looking for enthusiastic speakers to come and show just how fantastic functional programming can be.

News

Come and join the F# Compiler & Tools team!

“Come and help us shape the future of F#! We are seeking a talented and highly motivated software engineer with experience in compilers, language tools and data-consumptive programming to help us ship the next version of F#.”

F# + Azure Skills? BuzzNumbers are looking for you…

“Interested in getting exposure to the latest technologies including MVC, F#, .NET 4.0 and Windows Azure?”

Brian McKenna is speaking on F# at the Open Programming Miniconf

“The F# compiler and library have recently been released under an open license. The language is modelled closely to OCaml but runs on the .NET platform. This allows programmers to harness the power of functional and object-oriented programming while still being able to utilise existing libraries.”

Audio and Video

Don Syme’s My Talk at TechEd Europe 2010: A Taste of F# – Today and Future

“Recently I gave a talk at TechEd Europe, in Berlin, entitled A Taste of F# – Today and Future, available below as slides + audio. If you don’t get the player below, then here’s the site with the raw WMV files.”

Tools

FsColorizerEditor – Release: FSharp Colorizer Editor

“The extension uses background colorization of the Visual Studio’s Code Editor to show the “control flow depth” of F# code.”

F# Math: Extreme Optimization 4.0 – 50 Quick Start samples in F#

“The guys at Extreme Optimization have released version 4.0 of their .NET math library.”

General

Brian McNamara’s Source code for F# XmlDoc extension

“I’ve just published the code for another VSIX extension; this one auto creates xml documentation boilerplate when you type triple-slash”

Phillip Trelford’s Fog Index

“The index estimates the years of formal education needed to understand the text on a first reading. Texts for a wide audience generally need a fog index less than 12.”

Tomas Petricek’s F# in Education & Concurrency with Agents

“Now that both of the events are over, I’d like to write a short summary and also finally publish my slides and demos.”

Richard Minerich’s In Retrospect: The F# in Education Workshop

“I was taking the elevator down after getting settled in my hotel room and as the doors opened I was awestruck by the sight of Don Syme sitting on a couch, typing away on his laptop.”

Stefano Ricciardi’s Project Euler Problem 15 in F#

“With Project Euler Problem 15 we approach the fascinating world of graphs (but, as we shall see, only in a very tangential fashion):”

Ian Voyce’s Beginning F#: Positive Discrimination

“Discriminated unions are one of those things in the lexicon of functional programming that can often sound baffling to “outsiders”; it’s almost up there with monads and currying. But in practice they’re simple and incredibly useful.”

Joel Björnson’s Generalizing formlets (in WebSharper)

“One of the news of WebSharper 2.0 is a redesigned formlet library. For an introduction to WebSharper formlets, see Creating web forms using WebSharper formlets. And for a running example, have a look at this demo.”

Cameron Taggart’s Asynchronous Serial Port Communication with F#

“Below, I show how communicate to a device over a serial port both ways. The advantage of the asynchronous approach is that it does not lock up the user interface if the device does not respond right away.”

A Brief Introduction to F# – MSDN UK Team blog

“Our guest writer for this fortnight’s MSDN Flash is Mark Bloodworth, an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft UK, who kindly offered to write a brief introduction to F#.”

Deen’s Dice’s Coefficient in F#

“A simple short implementation of Dice’s Coefficient in F#. Array.map and Array.fold could be replaced by one function* but I feel its clearer as is.”

Setting the user agent of a Web request

“More and more Websites are denying requests that aren’t sent by recognized browsers and search engines crawlers. This restriction is usually bypassed by setting the user agent string of the request which is possible with the WebRequest and WebClient classes:”

Community

Stack Overflow – F# and Fuzzy Logic

“There are many application of this language, I am going to learn, regarding parsing, functional programming, structured programming… But what about artificial intelligence?”

Also, I wanted to share some great news about the NYC F# User Group: We already have  49 people confirmed for our first meeting! I hope we get a 50th soon, that last digit is driving me nuts!

Audio and Video

TickSpec – BDD for C# & F# & Writing concurrent applications using agents

“TickSpec is a lightweight Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework for C# and F#. Specify the behaviour of your system in plain text with the Gherkin business language. […] In his talk Tomas will show us how to implement message passing concurrency in F# using agents (the MailboxProcessor type in F#). In this style of programming, we write an application as a group of agents that run in parallel and communicate by sending immutable messages to each other.”

Joe Duffy: Perspectives on Concurrent Programming and Parallelism

“Joe Duffy spends a lot of time thinking about the future of concurrent programming and parallelism. In his role as Lead Developer in the Parallel Computing Platform team, Joe is the creator of PLINQ and a key contributor to many of the managed (.NET) concurrency incubations happening in and around his broader team.”

Tools

WebSharper 2.0 Beta available

“We are making excellent progress on releasing WebSharper 2.0 in the coming weeks, and have just put out the first beta version of WebSharper 2.0, ready for some public testing and community feedback.”

F# MathProvider

“F# Math Provider wrappers to native Blas and Lapack runtimes for F# users to perform linear algebra easily.”

neuralcryptography – Release: Neural Cryptography 0.0.5

“This release provides the basic functionality that this project was supposed to have from the very beginning: it can hash strings using neural network! Current code works with 8-length strings but network creation function supports any input and output lengths.”

General

Phillip Trelford’s Tic-tac-toe

“Thanks to a recent article by Cameron Taggart it is now possible to Create F# Silverlight Apps from Visual Studio 2010 Shell. This means that you now don’t need to use a C# project to build the XAP file.”

Tomas Petricek’s Asynchronous C# and F# (III.): How does it work?

“Let’s start by looking at the mechanism used in the C# compiler. If you already know how iterators work in C# 2.0, then you’ll find it quite easy to understand.”

Joh’s XNA GS 4.0 + F# 2.0 + Xbox 360 = love !

“It’s the first time I make a Visual Studio extension package, I hope I got it right. It’s available on the Visual Studio gallery. If you try it out, please let me know if it worked for you (or if it did not).”

Vladimir Matveev’s (null : string).GetEnumerator() ?

“Expecting NullReferenceException? Well, time for little dissapointment, because this code will be compiled and executed without any errors.”

Kean Walmsley’s Misusing mutable state with F# Asynchronous Workflows

“Or perhaps the title should really be “why it’s really a good idea to avoid misusing mutable state when using F# Asynchronous Workflows””

Ashley Feniello’s Bowling Kata

“Our team’s been doing Katas to get the hang of TDD. One such kata (calculating bowling scores) struck me as insanely simple with pattern matching in F#:”

Rey Dacoco’s Example #17 (Array.Iter)

“Problem: Make a console application that will convert the following singular nouns to plural. Use Array.Iter:”

Stefano Ricciardi’s Project Euler Problem 14 in F#

“As with many other Project Euler problems, we are requested to generate a sequence (in this case a sequence of “Collatz sequences”) and to single out one item matching a certain criteria.”

Password Generator

“The following application generates random and strong passwords (if you stick with 14+ characters). For strength evaluation, the same algorithm used by Microsoft’s password checker is implemented.”

Lorenzo Stoakes’ F# Rocks

“Rather than go over the slides in detail in this blog post, I am working on a series of posts entitled ‘F# for the Working C# Programmer’ where I will provide a proper tutorial on the language.”

Mark Bloodworth’s A Brief Introduction to F#

“Out guest writer for this issue is Mark Bloodworth, an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft UK, who kindly offered to write a brief introduction to F#.”

WebSharper: Integration with ASP.NET MVC

“With MVC being a server-centric framework and WebSharper being the #1 platform for creating client-based applications, marrying the two can yield a strong synergy.”

Mikael Lundin’s Performance in C# recursion vs. F#

“I did know that the F# compiler pulls some magic tricks with recursion, but I didn’t know that it could affect performance like I’ve recently discovered.”

Community

StackOverflow – FSI.exe does not work under Ubuntu 10.10

“Got quick response from Don Syme. The solution he suggested resolved this issue. I created the answer myself.”

HubFS – Type classes in F#

“After a couple of weeks rushing into a "type class feature in .NET" problem, I can now propose a way to make it possible.”