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F# Webcast (II.) - Using .NET libraries

About a week ago I posted the first part of my F# webcast series. It focused on explainining the basic ideas behind functional programming such as immutability, recursion and passing functions as arguments to other functions (or methods in C#). In the first part, we've seen some C# code to demonstrate the ideas and also a bit of F#, mainly to show the basic language features.

The second part is going to be exclusively about F#. It'll demonstrate how we can start writing a demo application that grabs data from RSS feeds and processes them. You'll learn how to access .NET libraries from F# (in particular, we'll use System.Net and System.Xml). We'll develop the code iteratively, which means that we'll start by simply enumerating the RSS elements using for loop and printing the results and then we'll refactor the code to use tuples and sequence expressions to turn it into processing code that generates a sequence of feed items. Finally we'll also demonstrate how to use some of the functions from the previous part such as List.filter in practice.

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F# Webcast Series

This webcast series follows the usual F# development process where you start with experimenting and writing an initial version of the solution interactively using the F# interactive tool. In the later phase of the process, we modify the code to make it parallel and asynchronous and finally, we can also encapsulate it into a standard .NET library that's usable from C#. Here is a list of all webcasts in the series:

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Published: Monday, 1 June 2009, 2:57 PM
Author: Tomas Petricek
Typos: Send me a pull request!
Tags: functional, asynchronous, webcast, f#