Spotlight Topics

Most of the content on this page is related to one of the topics that I was recently interested in, so here you can find a page for every topic with some my articles, comments and other useful links:

• F# Language, Functional Programming, etc.

  F# is a multi-paradigm programming language for .NET from Microsoft Resarch, which supports functional, object-oriented and language-oriented style.

• Phalanger - PHP Language Compiler for .NET

  Phalanger is an open-source PHP compiler, which is able to run many existing PHP applications and is fully integrated with .NET.

• C# 3.0 and the LINQ Project

  Aside from querying facilities integrated in the new language version, C# 3.0 also enables using several interesting functional techniques.

Academic Stuff

As already mentioned, I'm a student of computer science at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics [^] of Charles University.

The topcis that I'm interested in are still changing :-), but you can find some up-to-date information on my academic page. My Bachelor thesis (it is available there) was about type-safe "AJAX" web development in F# with modality tracked in a type system using computation expressions (aka "monads"), so you can expect topics related to programming languages and tools...

• Visit my academic page.

Photography

I like taking photos, but updating the online gallery frequently was always a bit problem :-). That's why this page has a calendar, which shows a new picture every month (and also forces me to find and upload a new picture regularly).

Calendar - January 2009

• Calendars for years 2005, 2006, 2007 and also for 2008
• Some more photos can be found in photo gallery

More About Me

I'm student and Microsoft C# MVP from Prague, Czech Republic. I'm studying computer science at Charles University of Prague and I finished Bachelor studies in 2007.

Recently, I spent 3 months in Microsoft Research as an intern (with the F# team) and started wokring on the F# WebTools [^] project which allows developing "AJAX" applications purely in F# and this was also a topic of my thesis. I believe that F# and functional programming has a very promissing future.

The second topic that I'm involved in is maintaining of a project called Phalanger [^], which is a PHP language compiler started by my fellow students.

Latest Articles by Tomáš Petříček

Functional Programming in .NET using C# and F# (Manning Greenpaper)

Functional programming languages have been around for a while and were always astonishing for their ability to express the ideas in a succinct, declarative way allowing the developer to focus on the essence of problem rather than on technical details of the solution. Recently, functional paradigm is gaining new prominence as an efficient way to handle development of multi-processor, parallel and asynchronous applications.

Functional ideas are arising in C# as well as in other main-stream languages and functional languages are becoming an alternative for real-world projects. Also, Microsoft recently introduced a new language called F#, which has a strong background in traditional functional languages, but as a .NET language also benefits from the rich .NET and Visual Studio ecosystem.

This article is partially an excerpt from my book Real-world Functional Programming in .NET [1]. Thanks to my editors at Manning I have the permission to publish it on my blog. We’ll look at several aspects of functional programming and how the same concepts, which are essential for the functional paradigm, look in the F# and in C# 3.0 with LINQ. We will shortly look at the basic programming language features like lambda functions and type inference that are now available in both F# and C#. Functional programming isn’t only about language features, but also about using different programming style, so we’ll look at some high level concepts as well. These include using immutable data structures for developing code that can be executed in parallel and writing code in a more declarative style.

Thanks to the combination of C# 3.0 and F#, this article shows the ideas in a way that should be familiar to you in C#, but also shows a further step that you can take with a primarilly functional language F#. If you're a .NET developer and you want to understand what functional programming is and how it can help you to become better and more productive then continue reading. If you'll find this article interesting, then don't forget to check out the book, which explains everything in larger detail and discusses many other interesting ideas.

Read the complete article
Thursday, December 11, 2008

More Recent Articles

• Reactive Programming (IV.) - Developing a game in Reactive LINQ (11/24/2008)

  In this article, we'll implement a simple iteractve game using the Reactive LINQ project. The article shows that this way of handling events gives us amog other things a great degree of composability.

• Reactive Programming (III.) - Useful Reactive LINQ Operators (11/21/2008)

  In the previous article, I introduced Reactive LINQ. Today, we're going to look at other operators that canbe used for working with events. We'll see aggregation is useful and how to dynamically change (switch) behavior.

• Reactive programming (II.) - Introducing Reactive LINQ (11/19/2008)

  In the second part of the series about reactive programming, I introduction the Reactive LINQ project, which allows writing event processing code in C# using LINQ queries.

• Reactive programming (I.) - First class events in F# (11/16/2008)

  The LINQ project and changes in C# 3.0 are interesting because they allow implementing many ideas from functional languages in C#. In this article I'll explain "first-class events" in F# and later I'll implemet similar concept using LINQ.

Other Links

My Projects

• F# Web Tools - Using the F# Web Tools you can author homogeneous client/server/database web applications in one type-checked project in F#. The distinction whether a code runs on the client (as JavaScript) or natively on the server is modeled using F# computation expressions.

• Phalanger - PHP Language Compiler with several language extensions to allow smooth interoperability between PHP and other .NET (for example C#) code. Phalanger is complete enough to run applications like WordPress or MediaWiki.

• LINQ Extensions - The project implements several useful extensions for the LINQ project. These extensions incude LINQ support for the C++/CLI language and simplified syntax or writing common types of database queries.

• Other Projects Archive - Contains links to several older or partially completed projects that are no longer in active development, but may still be fun or even useful.