Programming user interfaces using F# workflows

Numerous Manning partners already published several exceprts from my Real-World Functional Programming book. You can find a list on the book's web page. However, the last excerpt published at DotNetSlackers is particularly interesting. It discusses how to use F# asynchronous workflows to write GUI applications. This is a very powerful programming pattern that is very difficult to do in any other .NET language. We first discussed it with Don Syme during my internship at Microsoft Research and I found it very elegant, so I made some space for it in the book. In fact, the entire Chapter 16 discusses various reactive programming techniques that can be used in F#.

When designing applications that don't react to external events, you have lots of control flow constructs available, such as if-then-else expressions, for loops and while loops in imperative languages, or recursion and higher-order functions in functional languages. Constructs like this make it easy to describe what the application does. The control flow is clearly visible in the source code, so drawing a flowchart to describe it is straightforward.

Understanding reactive applications is much more difficult. A typical C# application or GUI control that needs to react to multiple events usually involves mutable state. When an event occurs, it updates the state and may run more code in response to the event, depending on the current state. This architecture makes it quite difficult to understand the potential states of the application and the transitions between them. Using asynchronous workflows, we can write the code in a way that makes the control flow of the application visible even for reactive applications.

You can read the complete article here: Programming user interfaces using F# workflows [^]. It is also worth adding that Manning offers 30% discount to DotNetSlackers readers (see the article for details!)