Entries tagged with fsharp - Channel 9

Discriminated Unions in F#

Kathleen McGrath — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:20:00 GMT

In this video, programming writer, Gordon Hogenson explains and gives examples of discriminated unions in F#.

You can also learn more in the topic Discriminated Unions (F#)

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen
Visual Studio and .NET Framework Content Survey

Andrew Kennedy: F# Units of Measure

Charles — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Floating point values in F# can have associated units of measure, which are typically used to indicate length, volume, mass, and so on. The built-in type float takes an optional unit-of-measure parameter, written in angle brackets, in a similar way that types such as IEnumerable take a type parameter, as in IEnumerable<int>.

By using quantities with units, you enable the compiler to verify that arithmetic relationships have the correct units, which helps prevent programming errors like the one that led to NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter being lost in September 1999. This was due to confusion between metric and so-called "English" units of measurement. The accident could have been prevented if the NASA engineers had been able to annotate their program code with units, and then employed static analysis tools or language-level type-checking to detect and fix any unit errors.

Andrew Kennedy is an MSR research scientist who implemented units of measure for F#. What did this involve? How does it work, exactly? What's next? Meet Andrew and learn all about F#'s latest language feature, units of measure.

Enjoy.

Information sources: http://msdn.com and http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewkennedy/

Active Patterns (F#)

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:59:00 GMT

In this video, programming writer, Gordon Hogenson, continues the discussion of patterns by talking about active patterns, which you can use to customize and extend F#’s pattern matching capabilities. Active patterns are an amazingly flexible language feature, and in this video we just scratch the surface of what can be done with them. You can learn more in the topic: Active Patterns.

Gordon would also like to thank Chris Smith and Brian McNamara, of the F# team, for giving him some ideas for how to use active patterns. Some similar examples to those in the video are discussed in F# team blog postings, such as in Chris Smith’s blog posting on active patterns. For those interested in exploring further, you can read a paper on active patterns by Don Syme, James Margetson, and Gregory Nemerov.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen/

Patterns and Match Expressions in F#

Kathleen McGrath — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:58:00 GMT

In this video, programming writer, Gordon Hogenson explains and gives examples of patterns in F# and explains the use of the match expression to control branching based on patterns in data. But first, a disclaimer Gordon wanted to make: “Regrettably, I have not been able to retrain myself yet to use the word value instead of variable. In F#, all values are immutable by default, so it’s not really correct to use the term variable, as I do in the video.” See Part 2 of this video: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/kmcgrath/Active-Patterns-F/

You can also learn more in the topics Patterns and Match Expressions.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen/

Creating Your First F# Program with Visual Studio 2010

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:03:00 GMT

This video demonstrates some of the tasks described in Walkthrough: Creating Your First F# Program with Visual Studio. I show you how to declare simple variables, write and test functions, and create tuples and lists.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education

Luke Hoban: Latest version of F# Released - What's the story? What's next?

Charles — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:24:00 GMT

With the release of VS 2010 Beta 1 today, F# is officially a part of the in-box VS family in the sense that it ships with VS 2010 as a first class language for use in building your .NET projects that require the power and flexibility of the functional approach to program composition. For VS 2008, a great IDE and toolset that you have at your disposal today, you can install the equivalent version of F# that ships with VS2010 Beta 1 as an add-in install. Right on!

Here, F# Program Manager Luke Hoban talks with me about F#, generally and what people have been doing with it, the current state of the technology, what F# enables, etc. You'll even see some code Luke's written, but this is mainly an Old School Channel 9 conversation. You know the drill.

Enjoy.

Learn more:

Don Syme's announcement of the F# 2010 beta release: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-2010-beta1-with-f-is-now-available-plus-matching-f-ctp-update-for-vs2008.aspx

The F# Dev Center: http://fsharp.net/

Jason Olson: Composing Programming Languages, F# and OO

Charles — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:15:00 GMT

Jason Olson is a programming language evangelist in addition to his duties as a managed (.NET) tools evangelist. You know him from C9. He's a long time Niner and has always been passionate about languages. I've known Jason for a long time and it's great to see him take his passionate intelligence and apply it to both learning several languages and writing his own. This is awesome to see! I caught up with Jason at Lang.NET 2009 where he gave two very interesting talks, one on F# and one on modern object orientation. Here, we talk about his presentations and his perspectives on object orientation, F# and his own language.

Enjoy!

10-4 Episode 17: F# Intro

Jason Olson — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:25:00 GMT

In this episode of 10-4, we take a quick look at F#, a new addition to the family of managed programming languages in Visual Studio 2010. F# is a multi-paradigm programming language. Though its focus is at functional programming, it's capable of producing object-oriented code like other .NET languages. Since it is a .NET language, it can interop just fine with other existing .NET languages.

There is a lot to F#, more than we could possibly cover in a single 10-4 episode. So in this episode, we are just taking a brief look at the basic data types in F# as well as some more intermediate features like recursion, pattern matching, and partially-applied functions.

For people wanting to following along with this episode, you can grab the latest F# CTP directly from the F# MSDN Dev Center:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/fsharp/default.aspx

For more 10-4 episodes, be sure to visit:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4

hubFS: THE place for F#:
http://cs.hubfs.net/

Don Syme's Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/

Dustin Campbell's Blog:
http://diditwith.net/

Chris Smith's Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrsmith/default.aspx

Luke Hoban's Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/

10-4! Over and out!

Don Syme: F# and functional programming in . NET

martinesmann — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week Don Syme joined me for an F# university tour here in Denmark.
The final stop on the tour was at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (mdcc.dk) for an open TechTalk on F# and functional programming on the .NET platform.

To make this talk as broadly available as possible, we just decided to recorded it :)

In the TechTalk Don touches on topics like asynchronous programming, graphics, why functional programming matters, just to mention a few topics … and everything explained with lots of samples and code!

Want to learn more about F#?
Visit Don’s blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/
or the hubFS community site, http://cs.hubfs.net

Enjoy!

Erik Meijer and Matthew Podwysocki - Perspectives on Functional Programming

Charles — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:50:00 GMT

Matthew Podwysocki is a senior consultant for Microsoft platform technologies in the D.C. area. He's been programming since he was a child and has a particular interest and passion for functional programming. Functional programming is all the rage these days. General purpose imperative languages (like C# and C++) are adding functional constructs to help improve software developer prodcutivity in an increasingly concurrent general purpose computing environment as notebooks and PCs with multiple processors are now the norm.

Matthew was in Redmond a few weeks ago, so we thought it would be awesome to invite Matthew into the the lair of our resident functional programming extremist (though I must say that Erik is mellowing out with age), high priest of the lamda calculus, category theorist and Expert to Expert host, Erik Meijer. Now, it's a little scary to be asked into Erik's den of functional orthodoxy (aka Erik's office) and be put to the task of explaining functional principals in a way that is widely accessible to developers who have little or no experience with thinking functional, but Matthew was up for the task and spends most of the time at Erik's whiteboard explaining important functional programming concepts (Haskell and F# are the languages used in the examples, but the language isn't that important - the concepts are), sharing some his very interesting history with us, waxing on future directions in programming, engaging us in a really interesting conversation. Great job, Matthew!

Enjoy!

Duration: 1:07:41

Don Syme: What's new in F# - Asynchronous Workflows (and welcome to the .NET family!)

Charles — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:56:34 GMT

I was lucky enough to catch up with Don Syme at TechED Developer 2007. I'm a big fan of F# and it's great to see that a product team is being formed to bring this powerful functional language into the official .NET family. Joining in this conversation are F# master Robert Pickering and a special guest, Tomas Petricek, who's done some amazing things with F# recently.

Here, we talk about, well, F# :) Specifically, we address what F# joining the .NET family means, what state the project is in, delve into concurrent programming and parallelism topics and look into (and at) the latest F# features that make it easier to exploit multi-core hardware. Don even does some demos on his laptop that show off some cool new async features of F# (async workflows) and hint to the future of the language.

It's always great to chat with Don. Tune in.

Enjoy.

Anders Hejlsberg, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer, Brian Beckman: Software Composability and the Future of

Charles — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:32:00 GMT

How will imperative programming languages evolve to suit the needs of developers in the age of Concurrency and Composability? What role can programming languages play in enabling true composability? What are the implications of LINQ on the furture of managed (CLS-based) and unmanaged(C++) languages? How will our imperative languages (static) become more functional (dynamic) in nature while preserving their static "experience" for developers?

Answers to these questions and much more are to be found in this interview with some of Microsoft's leading language designers and programming thought leaders: Anders Hejlsberg, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C#, Herb Sutter, Architect in the C++ language design group, Erik Meijer, Architect in both VB.Net and C# language design and programming language guru, and Brian Beckman, physicist and programming language architect working on VB.Net.

This is a great conversation with some of the industry's most influential programming language designers. Tune in. You may be surprised by what you learn...

MSR Cambridge Tour: Machine Learning Group, Computer Vision and F#

Charles — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:32:02 GMT

While in Cambridge recently to you've seen him before).

There's a lot of incredible work going on in MSR Cambridge. Come along and meet some the people working on next generation computing technologies.

Don Syme: Introduction to F#, Part 2

Charles — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:59:56 GMT

The conversation Mike Hall recently had with Don Syme, a researcher at MSR Cambridge who focuses on language development and is the key author of F#, continues. (Don's blog!

Don Syme: Introduction to F#, Part 1

Charles — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:18:52 GMT

Mike Hall caught up with Don Syme recently and recorded a few interviews covering Don's favorite programming language: F#. F#???

Don has done many great things over there in MSR Cambridge including creating everybody's favorite C# feature, Generics. Well, he also developed (with his team) the "research" programming language, F#.

"F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system."

Check out Don's blog!