F# Webcast (I.) - Introducing functional concepts

Now that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is out, it is finally a good time to take a look at one of the (in my opinion) most interesting new features in the new release - the F# language. F# existed for quite a long time now as Microsoft Research project, but is now becoming a real Microsoft product. Interestingly, F# is still available as a plugin for Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to try it you don't have to install the whole new beta of 2010.

There are already many resources for learning F# including my functional programming overview, which is a Manning Greenpaper for the book Functional Programming for the Real World that I'm writing with Jon Skeet and my four-part F# introduction. There are also some useful links on the official F# web site including some talk recordings. However, I haven't yet seen any good F# webcast focusing mainly on showing F# source code, starting from simple functional concepts to the real-world features like asynchronous workflows and object-oriented programming in F#, so I decided to create one.

So, here it is...

Internship project: Reactive pattern matching

I already mentioned that I was doing my second internship with Don Syme at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. This time, I was in Cambridge for 6 months from October until April, so it has been more than a month since I left, but as you can guess I didn't have time to write anything about the internship until now... There isn't much to say though, because the internship was simply fantastic. Cambridge is a beautiful place (here are some autumn and winter photos), the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge is full of smart people, so it is a perferct working environment (except that you realize that you're not as clever as you think :-)). Also, it is just a few meters away from the Computer Laboratory of the Cambridge University, so there are always many interesting talks and seminars. So, big thanks to Don Syme, James Margetson and everyone else who I had a chance to work with during the internship.

One of the reasons why I didn't have much time to write about the internship earlier is that I was invited to the Lang.NET Symposium shortly after the end of the internship. I had a chance to talk about my project there as well and there is even a video recording from the talk (the link is below), so you can watch it to find out more about my recent F# work.

All blog posts by tag