Charles University

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Today: July 31, 2010

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The Duality of Object and Event references
This article describes an interesting example of mathematical duality in programming languages - the duality between references between objects and references between events. The idea is useful for understading what events are garbage and can be garbage collected.

English | 7/19/2010
Dynamic in F#: Reading data from SQL database
In this article we look at working with SQL databases in F# using ADO.NET. We'll see how to use dynamic invoke operator to make the usual ADO.NET code remarkably elegant and simple...

English | 7/9/2010
PLDI 2010 Trip Report
In June, I attended PLDI 2010, which is one of the big "programming language" conferences. I presented a paper based on some work that I did during my internship at MSR at one of the workshops and I also attended many interesting talks...

English | 7/5/2010
Recording and samples from my Reactive F# talk
Almost a week ago, I posted an invitation to my F# talk at the F#unctional Londoners user group. The talk has been recorded, so you can view it online now and you can also get all the Silverlight demos...

English | 6/27/2010
Reactive Programming with F# in London
I'll be visiting London on June 23 and I'll be talking at the F#unctional Londoners user group. The theme of the talk is Reactive Programming with F# and you can expect many interesting F# features including asynchronous workflows and event combinators.

English | 6/15/2010

My functional .NET book

You can find more information about my functional programming book on the book web site.

You can order a print book or an ebook directly from Manning!

About the Author

Currently, I'm Masters student of computer science at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics [^] at Charles Univeristy [^]. I live in Prague [^], which is a capital city of Czech Republic [^]. My name is actually "Tomáš Petříček", but I don't want to scare people with all the diacritics, so I usually write my name without it. I can be contacted at tomas@tomasp.net.

I recently finished Bachelors degree with a thesis that demonstrated how to use meta-programming and monadic types to do type-safe Ajax web development in a single programming language and I had a pleasure to work on this topic as an intern in Microsoft Research in Cambridge under a supervision of Don Syme [^]. The project that I developed there is called F# Web Tools and I wrote some articles about it on this web.

I'm also Microsoft C# MVP (since 2004) and I'm author of many articles about .NET (and some other related topics). Some of my most interesting articles are available at CodeProject [^] and the rest of articles can be found in 'articles' section on this web. I'm also working on several open-source projects that are available at CodePlex site. You should definitely check out the Phalanger [^] project, which is a PHP language compiler for .NET, which runs many famous PHP open source applications and enables integration with .NET technologies. The F# WebTools [^] project makes it possible to develop Ajax web sites purely in F# with tight integration between server-side and client-side. LINQ Extensions [^] includes several LINQ-related libraries that can be useful to any C# developer.

My Recommendations

To put some useful things on this page, I decided to write short list of (technical) things that I recommend to any visitor of my page :-)

Learn the F# programming language [^] and functional programming in general. The F# language will be fully supported by Microsoft, so it is possible to use it for 'real' projects, but even if you won't use it, the functional paradigm will give you a new and very interesting view on programming.
If you're using PHP than try the Phalanger [^] project and combine the simplicity of PHP with the power of .NET. If you'd like to contribute to the development of Phalanger, send me an e-mail!
Write some articles about what you do, because you'll learn a lot and it also helps to get a good job :-). I published my first articles at CodeProject [^], which has a great communty and I can only recommend it. If you want to write something in Czech than you can go to Vyvojar.cz [^] or NetStudent.cz [^].
Study computer science at Charles University [^]. You'll have to do a lot of math, but you'll learn much more than how to drop some controls on a form. And by the way, after some time, you'll very likely start enjoying the math (at least some parts of it :-)).

Published: January 10, 2007 22:27