Robert Pickering's Strange Blog

So this blog has been quite lately, well it never was the most active in the world. Anyway the good news is there are lots of other good F# resources on the web at the moment. Particually Lang.NET was a great source of F# videos, I was there myself, but I’ve spoke with a few people who were, and indeed there they told me there was lots of interest in F#.

A couple of videos I really liked were:

Luke Hoban on F# Productization: This was an interesting talk, not because it when in depth into F# the language, but because Luke gave a peak behind the scenes of how you run a major F# project - the productization.

http://www.langnetsymposium.com/2009/talks/25-LukeHoban-FSharpProductization.html

Amanda Laucher on F# Concurrency: This a very interesting talk from the charismatic Amanda “Pandamonial” Laucher. Amanda presents a case study of a real world project she’s been working on in the insurance domain. Her mission was to use the concurrency features of F# speed up the companies risk calculations, and the results she achieved are quite amazing. She presents what I see as very compelling reasons for using F#:

http://www.langnetsymposium.com/2009/talks/21-AmanderLauter-FSharpConcurrency.html

Of course I can’t not mention the “Language Oriented Programming in F#” talk by Roger Castillo at Lang.net’s sister event “DslDevCon”. I was briefly involved with the organization of this talk, though to be fair it was Chance Coble and Roger who did the hard work. I was hoping to make it to the event to co-present the talk, but alas, Paris is a long way from Seattle:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/dd727739.aspx

Other note worthy videos are Luke Hoban on F#, who makes some very interesting points about how F# programming differs from programming in C#. I like this video because it builds on what Brian McNamara said in this blog post.

Phil Trelford, did a nice session for the skillsmatter.com guys and gals, and also has another planned.

There’s also this series of 4 web casts from Tomáš Petříček, which to be honest I haven’t had chance to watch yet, but knowing Tomas’ work I’m sure they’ll be very high quality.

Back in February this year I spoke at TechDays Paris 2009, I’ve always enjoyed TechDays Paris so a big thanks to Eric Mittelette and his team for inviting me to speak. Also, many thanks Julien Laugel who help me review the presentation slides and also shared some his experiences using F# with the audience. A screen cast of this presentation is now available. The slides for this presentation are available on the slideshare.net site and the code from the slides is available here, except from the collective intelligence part which is available in its github project.

(aside: I’ve not been actively working on CI project for a while now, but will pick it up sooner or later. I’ve also been talking to Matthew Podywsocki, Joel Pobar, and a few others, who have similar interests in F# and CI, if you’re interested in contributing please contact me)

I was also lucky enough to be invited by Scott Bellware to give a tutorial at the “Progressive .NET Tutorials” at London, in partnership with skillsmatter.com. The podcast of this tutorial is now available on line, but its 3 hours long so not really for one sitting! The code form the tutorials in available here.