July 5, 2010
Daniel Mohl - 5 Best Practices for F# Development
Slides | Video
F# makes it very easy to develop high performance, readable, and efficient code. However, like all things, a lack of discipline and best practice adoption can lead to a mess. In this talk we will cover 5 best practices that you can start using today to make yourself a better F# developer. We will explore each best practice, discuss the reason(s) that the described approach is preferred, and explore a few examples.
Daniel Mohl is a professional software engineer with over 11 years of hands-on development and team lead experience. He actively blogs and tweets about F#, has spoken on F# at various forums, and co-organized the Nashville F# Firestarter. You can view his blog at blog.danielmohl.com and follow him on twitter at twitter.com/dmohl.
June 7, 2010
Steffen Forkmann - Open Source Tools in F#
Slides | Video
Steffen is the author of the two open source F# projects: FAKE - F# Make and NaturalSpec. In this talk, he shows these tools in action, and talks a bit about some internal implementation details. In particular he shows why he used F# and how specific language constructs help to simplify the usage.
May 3, 2010
Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell - .NET Rocks! Visual Studio Road Trip
Ken Pespisa's Blog | Rick's Blog
Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to your town again to show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! And to make the night even more fun, we’re going to bring a mystery rock star from the Visual Studio world to the event and interview them for a special .NET Rocks Road Trip show series. Along the way we’ll be giving away some great prizes, showing off some awesome technology and having a ton of laughs.
This stop will include an intro to F# and a special topic panel dicussion on F# featuring New England F# User leaders:
- Richard Hale Shaw (MVP)
- Rick Minerich (MVP)
- Talbott Crowell
April 5, 2010
Talbott Crowell - F# and Silverlight
Slides | Video
Learn how to use F# to build Silverlight applications using the Silverlight toolkit to make graphs and charts. No knowlege of F# necessary. Visual Studio and either C# or VB.NET knowledge is recommended.
March 1, 2010
Jason King - Safe and Succinct F#
Slides | Video
We'll explore some of the features of F# that help to write short, correct, and readable program
February 1, 2010
Rick Minerich - F# Tools and Frameworks
Slides | Video
We are going to explore a few of the many F# Tools and Testing Frameworks. Included will be NaturalSpec, FsCheck and perhaps some others.
January 4, 2010
Mutaamba Maasha - Categories and Reason
Slides | Video
An exploration of structures from category theory and the roles they play in functional programming from an F# perspective. Applications and examples will be presented along with a discussion on how to utilize these structures in F# programs. The ability to provide fast, reliable and secure programs depends greatly on what we can reason and assume about programs - with the aid of the machine proof assistant CoQ, emphasis will be placed on what we can reason about F# programs and the value this reasoning provides us.
December 7, 2009
Talbott Crowell - Parallel Programming with F#
Slides | Video
Asynchronous, concurrent, and parallel programming can be challenging. Microsoft has been working on several projects to make these tasks less difficult and more robust. Many of these projects, including the Task Parallel Library, PLINQ, and functional programming via F#, have matured to the point that they are ready for prime time and will be baked into Visual Studio 2010. Talbott will describe the different concepts of concurrent programming and investigate some of F#'s inherent mechanisms for addressing these challenges such as Asynchronous Workflows.
November 2, 2009
Adam Chlipala - Towards the Ultimate Web Application Framework, via Fancy Types
Slides | Video1 Video2
In choosing the right framework for building a modern web application, there are many trade-offs to be made. A cynic might be tempted to say:
"Programmer productivity, security, scalability: pick 2 (or maybe just 1?)". This talk is about my attempt to jam all three into one framework. In fact, I will be talking about a new domain-specific programming language, Ur/Web. I claim that Ur/Web is significantly ahead of all of the mainstream competition, in every one of the three categories I mentioned. Ur/Web supports new abstraction and modularity techniques, statically guarantees absence of common security vulnerabilities, and has an optimizing compiler that generates fast native code that doesn't use garbage collection. The secret weapon is ideas from the world of typed functional programming, including the ML family, Haskell, and more recent advances in dependently-typed programming.
I will demonstrate the key elements of Ur/Web through a series of demo applications with source code. This will be an interactive presentation, and we can try modifying the demos or cooking up new ones on the fly, in response to what the audience is curious about.The way we deal with data is changing. Increasingly, model based approaches are having an effect on the way we organize and implement the notation we use to compose data transformations and manage side effects. At the basic end of this spectrum is the philosophy of fluent interfaces, and domain driven design. At the extreme end is the full implementation of domain specific languages. I refer to a design driven by its placement on this spectrum as Language Oriented Programming. In this talk I will explore several examples of Language Oriented Programming, and show that this particular design approach hits the sweet spot of F# and functional programming. Examples will include functional notation as a language, modeling language design with algebraic data types and transforming models to execute on alternative platforms such as the GPU.
October 5, 2009
Chance Coble - Language Oriented Programming in F#
Slides | Video
The way we deal with data is changing. Increasingly, model based approaches are having an effect on the way we organize and implement the notation we use to compose data transformations and manage side effects. At the basic end of this spectrum is the philosophy of fluent interfaces, and domain driven design. At the extreme end is the full implementation of domain specific languages. I refer to a design driven by its placement on this spectrum as Language Oriented Programming. In this talk I will explore several examples of Language Oriented Programming, and show that this particular design approach hits the sweet spot of F# and functional programming. Examples will include functional notation as a language, modeling language design with algebraic data types and transforming models to execute on alternative platforms such as the GPU.
September 7, 2009
Robert Pickering - Why F# Is Like It Is
Slides | Alternate Video
"In this talk we’ll take another look at some of the core features of F#, from an advanced user point of view, to better understand why the language has those features in the first place. We’ll go on to talk about how this affects the way that F# programs are structured. The architecture of a functional style program will be compared to the way that traditional procedural and object oriented programs are structured."
August 3, 2009
Matthew Podwysocki - Parallelism in F#
Slides | Video
"With the increasing amount of data available to us, we need new ways of thinking around how to create scalable solutions in order to best exploit it. In the past, concurrency programming has been difficult with very few understanding the low-level constructs such as locks, semaphores, mutexes and so on. The multi-core revolution gives us an opportunity to look at concurrency in different ways rather than our shared-state past. Languages such as F# are well suited as it is a functional language which emphasizes immutability, side effect free functions and a lack of state. Through the use of rich programming models, and functional programming techniques, come find out how F# can create rich solutions using asynchronous and parallel programming techniques."
July 6, 2009
Amanda Laucher - Pragmatic F# in action
Slides | Video
"F# is Microsoft’s multi-paradigm language which sets out to deal with problems in the .Net ecosystem that are more easily solved with a functional approach. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the basic syntax which although itself is interesting, it’s now time to check out what people are doing with the language in a commercial context. We’ll show how F# helps out with concurrent programming in an actual enterprise application including legacy code interaction. We’ll also discuss OO FP as an architectural decision: the good, the bad, and the ugly."
June 1, 2009
Richard Hale Shaw - F# and Pattern Matching
Slides | Video
"Arguably one of the most powerful features of the F# Language is its pattern-matching capability. Often touted as F#’s approach to if-then and switch-case control flow, Pattern-Matching does all this – and more. In this session, Richard will start with the fundamentals of Pattern-Matching (what it is, and how it works) and he’ll follow with alternative applications of it. We’ll look at Pattern-Matching syntax and how it compares to C#, conditional matching and guard rules, what happens with unmatched patterns and how to apply Pattern-Matching in a variety of scenarios. You’ll leave the session with a deeper understanding of the power of F#’s pattern-matching features and how you can use it in F# programs (or leverage it from C# programs)."
May 4, 2009
Antonio Cisternino - Introducing VSLab
Slides | Video
"In this talk I introduce VSLab, an environment based on F# and Visual Studio integration, designed to offer an environment similar to Matlab or Mathematica, suitable for Scientific computing. VSLab is an add-in developed at University of Pisa in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. whose main contribution is the ability to control Visual Studio toolwindows from F# interactive even if the interaction is between two distinct processes. VSLab is an interesting F# application in several respects, interop, integration in Visual Studio, and core windows programming."
April 9, 2009
Richard Minerich - New England F# User Group Jumpstart and Code Kata
Slides | Video
"For the first meeting of the New England F# User Group I gave a 30 minute rundown of the most fundamental language features and syntax. I then, as a code kata, had the group work through Project Euler problem #25."