Announcing F# snippets web site

When writing F# programs, I often write some nice code snippet or some useful helper function that I'd like to share with the F# community. Unfortunately, my blog posts are usually longer and more elaborate, so I never get to blogging about it. Now that I have a twitter (follow me if you don't already) I thought I could just post the snippet somewhere, but there was no good web site for posting F# snippets - until now!

• If you can't wait any further, then go directly to the new F# snippets web site at fssnip.net.

The web site uses my earlier project F# Web Snippets to format F# source code. It highlights colors and adds JavaScript tooltips using services provided by the F# compiler, which means that you'll get almost the same experience as when reading code in Visual Studio. I also wanted to make the page a repository of browsable snippets, so you can use it in two ways...

F# community on GitHub & MonoDevelop update

When I talked with Miguel de Icaza and Michael Hutchinson at the F# in Education workshop some time ago, someone mentioned that it would be nice to have a clone of the official F# code drop that could accept patches from the community. I also talked with Michael about GitHub and I think I finally understood why everybody uses it today. I said to myself that I'll need to take a look at it when I'll have a bit of time... After coming back from the workshop, I was quite busy getting the F# plugin for MonoDevelop out, but after I wrote about it, I finally found some time to look at GitHub.

I really like the way Mono team uses GitHub. They have a single "mono" organization that is owned by several people from the Mono community and all important projects that are parts of Mono have their repository as part of the "mono" organization. Thanks to GitHub, everyone can easily clone the repository, do some changes and submit a "pull request" to the main repository.

I thought that the F# community could follow the same model, so I started the F# community organization on GitHub...

F# in MonoDevelop and cross-platform web sites & screencasts

About a week ago, I attended the F# in Education workshop in Boston. It was a great event with many interesting people around. I believe that the workshop was very exciting for everyone who is interested in F#, but uses Mac or Linux. The F# team recently made some effort to improve the F# support on Mono (meaning mainly Mac and Linux). The recent November 2010 CTP update contains several bugfixes that make it possible to use F# on Mono 2.8. Another great thing that happened at the workshop is the open source release of F# (see also blog post by Miguel with a post-check-in photo). At the workshop, I also announced my contribution to the cross-platform F# story, a project that I've been working on recently - the F# language binding for MonoDevelop.

Click here for a larger screenshot

I promised to make it available as soon as possible after the workshop. As usually, things take longer, than one would like, but I'm finally ready to announce the initial (beta) version of the plugin. The screenshot on the right shows some of the features of the F# language binding. As you can see, there is an F# Interactive tool window, syntax highlighting as well as IntelliSense auto-completion.

If you're interested in trying it out, here are links to the repository (you can use it to install the language binding from the MonoDevelop Add-ins manager) and source code. The F# plugin needs to be able to locate F# installation and it also requires more F# assemblies to be installed in the GAC, so you may as well want to read the instructions before trying it :-).

• Project homepage at the Functional Variations web site has more information about the project as well as detailed installation instructions.
• I also created a web page that contains information about installing F# on Mac and Linux which explains how to install F#, such that the MonoDevelop plugin can find it.
• The source code is available in the F# cross-platform packages and samples project at CodePlex (under the Apache 2.0 license). You can find it in the monodevelop subdirectory.
• Online repositiory with a MonoDevelop package is available at: http://functional-variations.net/addin.
  (If you're a hacker, the easiest way to get it working is to add FSharp.Compiler* to GAC and set FSHARP_COMPILER_BIN environment variable to F# installation location)

If you want to see some interesting uses of the F# MonoDevelop plugin, you can also watch my talk at the F# in Education event. In one demo, I used F# on Mac to play with a simple, composable functional 3D library. In another example I demonstrated how to asynchronously process stock prices on Linux. The last demo, showing my match! extension didn't work all that well, because I had too many virtual machines running, but I'll blog about match! again sooner or later!

In addition to the F# plugin for MonoDevelop itself, I'd also like to mention two web sites that I've been working on and some interesting cross-platform F# screencasts...

PLDI 2010 Trip Report

In June, I attended my first "big" academic conference Programming Languages Design and Implementation (PLDI 2010) in Toronto. I attended the conference, because I presented a paper that I wrote with Don Syme as a result of my internship at Microsoft Research, but I'll write more about that shortly (and thanks to MSR for partly supporting my attendance at the conference!)

As far as I understand it, the focus of the conference is more on implementation. Many people believe that the current programming languages are good enough and we need to make sure that they run well (e.g. compilers optimize code to run better on multi-core) and that we need better tools for working with them (e.g. automatic verification of the code we write), so these areas were the main focus of the conference. However, there were some very interesting talks on the design of programming languages, which is an area that I personally find more interesting...

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 theme of my talk was reactive programming, which was also a topic of my Master's thesis (defended earlier in June), so I really enjoyed talking about it. In the talk, I discussed the two approaches that you can use for developing reactive applications in F# (using examples in Silverlight):

• Declarative (or data-flow oriented) allows you to describe "what" should be done with data that your component receives from various events (such as mouse position etc.) This can be written using F# event combinators such as Event.map and Event.scan.
• Imperative (or control-flow oriented) - in this style, we describe various states of the component (e.g. semaphore with green, orange and red) and describe transitions between the states. This can be written using F# asynchronous workflows and the AwaitObservable primitive (which you can get as part of the source code).

Thanks to the folks from SkillsMatter who provided place for the meetup and helped with the organization, the talk was also recorded and is already available online! Below, you can also get all the nice Silverlight demos that I used during the talk...

Thanks again to Carolyn Miller and Phil Trelford for organizing the talk and also to Don Syme for taking me to the airport in the early morning (at 4 AM...) after the talk.

Links & Resources

• Reactive Programming in F# (recording) - Skills Matter
• Slides from the talk (PDF, PPTX formats)
• Reactive F# demos in Silverlight (includes AwaitObservable implementation)

Reactive Programming with F# in London

If you’re a registered member of the F#unctional Londoners user group, then you maybe already know that I'll be visiting London on June 23 and I’ll be talking about Reactive programming with F#. If you're not a registered member and occasionally visit London, then you should definitely register. The user group is organized by Carolyn Miller and Phil Trelford (whom I met some time ago at Microsoft Research in Cambridge). Among others, previous speakers include Robert Pickering (who also presented some samples based on my F# and Accelerator series). Finally, another reason for joining the group is that it has a great name (as well as a logo)!

When, what & where?

• Tomas Petricek on Reactive Programming with F#
• Date & time: 23 June (Wednesday), 6:30 PM
• Location: The Skills Matter eXchange, 116-120 Goswell Road, London

By the way, I'll also have a free copy of my Real-World Functional Programming book to give away during the talk!

Reactive Programming with F#

I'm sure you're already convinced to come. Nevertheless, you may still want to know what I'm going to talk about. There are many areas where F# offers clear benefits such as parallel & concurrent programming. I believe that reactive programming is another great area for F#. In reactive programming, we face quite different problems than in other programming styles. We (as the authors of the application) can no longer specify what the application should do. Instead, the application needs to be able to handle many possible combinations of events. This aspect of programming is sometimes called inversion of control.

Reactive programming is important for programming user interfaces, especially today when user interfaces are becoming more interactive and more "fancy". To demonstrate this, I'm working on some nice Silverlight demos for the talk! However, it is also needed to handle other kinds of events such as completion of background task or message from other application. We'll look at the two essential techniques that F# provides for reactive programming:

• Declarative event combinators - one way of writing reactive applications is to specify the whole event processing declaratively by saying "what" should be done with occurrences of events. This is particularly useful when we need to encode simpler logic with a clear data-flow.
• Imperative using workflows - for more complicated interactions, we can use asynchronous workflows. This makes the code more explicit, but we get full control over the control-flow of the application. Even though this approach is more "imperative" it can be used for writing nicely composable functional code as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing you at the talk next week!

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!)

Deal of the day: Real-World Functional Programming

Some time ago, I received my copies of Real-World Functional Programming. I started working on it back in May 2008 and as many people who had more experience with writing books told me, it took longer than I was expecting! Anyway, I have to say, it was worth it, holding the actual printed book with my name on the cover is just fantastic!

The goal of the book is to present functional programming concepts and ideas in a readable form. I wanted to create a book that will teach you how to think functionally without using the usual shock therapy that people usually feel when seeing functional programming for the first time. There are already a couple of reviews that suggest I was quite successful:

• Functional Programming for the Real World, by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet, has been a very helpful book for moving to F# from C#, as the authors do a fantastic job of helping to explain the differences between OOP and FP.
  James Black at Amazon.com
• This book isn’t just a simple introduction to programming in F#; it’s an introductory text on functional programming covering the many reasons why it is time for this programming paradigm to finally be accepted by mainstream programmers. And it also contains much more...
  CliveT, Software Engineer at Red Gate Software
• ... and there are many other great comments about the book at Manning book page.

Deal of the day (January 24)

Finally, here is one great news if you're interested in getting the book! Real-World Functional Programming is Manning's Deal of the Day this Sunday, January 24. On this day, the print book is available for $20 from the Manning website, with code dotd0124.

Real-World Functional Programming: Completed and printed!

If you're following my blog or if you're interested in F# or functional programming in .NET, you probably noticed that I was working on a book Real-World Functional Programming. At some point, we called it Functional Programming for the Real-World, but then we changed the title back to a better sounding version Real-World Functional Programming (subtitle With examples in F# and C#). The book is also reason for a lower number of blog posts over the last year. Over the last month or so, we were doing the final edits, reviewing the final PDF version (I fixed quite a lot minor issues, synchronized book with the Beta 2 F# release and so on). Anyway, before a few days, I received the following email (as an author, I receive the same emails as those who ordered the book through the Manning Early Access Program, so that I can see what we're sending to our dear readers):

Dear Tomas Petricek, We are pleased to announce that Real-World Functional Programming is now complete! As a MEAP subscriber you can download your copy of the finished ebook right now! (...) This ebook is the final version, identical to the softbound edition, which is currently being printed and will be available on December 24. If you chose the printed book option when you originally subscribed, we'll ship it to you automatically—no action required from you.

Finally finished!

Yes, that's right. The book is finally completed and as far as I know, it has been printed last week! If you already ordered the book, you won't receive it before Christmas, but it should come shortly after. I can't wait to see the book actually printed. The transition from the Word drafts I initially wrote to a final PDF version was already felt fantastic and I thought "It looks like a real book!" Among other things, there are now graphical arrows with comments inside listings, which looks really great and makes code listings much easier to read. Now I can look forward to seeing the actual book. Maybe I'm too conservative, but I have to say that I'm really glad that I wrote the book before everything is going to be published just electronically!

Here is a couple of links that you may found interesting if you want to look inside the book...

Functional Programming: Available Chapter Excerpts & Discount

The work on my book Functional Programming for the Real World is slowly getting to the end. I'm currently creating index for the last couple of chapters and doing final updates based on the feedback from reviews and also from the forum at manning.com (this means that if you have some suggestions, it's the best time to post them - I haven't yet replied to all of them, but I'll certainly do that before the manuscript will go to the production).

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.

Real World Functional Programming: Second review finished!

I've been working on the Real World Functional Programming in .NET book for quite some time now. In fact, I had the first discussions with Michael Stephens from Manning in March last year and I started thinking about the book at that time, so it has been occupying my mind for almost a year now! Until recently, I was feeling that we're not getting much closer to the end of this project, because writing a book is just a lot of work. However, I think I can finally see that we're getting closer to actually finishing the book. At Manning, we've recently finished the second review, which means that I've just got another set of very useful comments - a big thanks to all the reviewers! I'm also getting close to finishing the first draft of the whole manuscript (depending on the reviews, the content may still change a bit, but I expect to write at most one new chapter from now). Hopefully, the drafts will soon make it to the MEAP release of the book.

Source code for Real World Functional Programming available!

As you can see, there has been quite a bit of silence on this blog for a while. There are two reasons for that - the first is that I'm still working on the book Real World Functional Programming, so all my writing activities are fully dedicated to the book. The second reason is that I'm having a great time doing an internship in the Programming Principles and Tools group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge with the F# team and namely the F# language designer Don Syme. The photo on the left side is the entrance gate to the Trinity College of the Cambridge University taken during the few days when there was a snow. I recently started using Live Gallery, so you can find more photos from Cambridge in my online gallery. Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick update with some information (and downloads!) related to the book...

Calculating with infinite sequences on MSDN

About a year ago, I wrote an article about using lazy computations in C# 3.0. It was published by the C# Community PM Charlie Calvert at the C# Developer Center. The article was a first of two articles where I wanted to demonstrate that C# 3.0 can be used for implementing useful constructs known from functional languages. I realized that I never posted the link to the second article to my blog, so you can find the annotation and link below.

However, I remembered about these two articles because I was just working on chapters 11 and 12 of the Real-world Functional Programming in .NET book that I’m writing. Lazy values, which were the topic of my first article, are discussed in the second part of chapter 11 and IEnumerable and F# sequences are the topic for the first part of chapter 12. Because I already wrote two articles on this topic, I had to think really hard to find better (and still simple enough) examples where these concepts are useful in practice. I also finally have enough space to show how these two concepts relate and talk about some interesting background – for example in Haskell, lazy sequences are in fact just ordinary lists that are lazy thanks to the Haskell nature.

A year ago, I definitely wouldn’t believe that today, I’ll be writing about the same topics, but this time as part of a book that has partly the same goal as these two articles – to show that functional programming ideas are really useful in the real-world and can enrich your programming toolbox (no matter whether you’re using C# or F# language). Anyway, here is the link to the second article – as usual when I look at something that I worked on a long time ago, I think I should rewrite it to make it better :-), but it still gives you an idea what is the book that I’m working on about...

Functional Programming in .NET book - An update

Recently, I announced on my blog that I’m working on a book for Manning called Real world Functional Programming in .NET. The goal of the book is to explain the most interesting and useful ideas of functional programming to a real world C# developer. I'm writing this book, because I believe that functional programming is becoming increasingly important. Here is a couple of reasons why you should have this book on your bookshelf:

• Ideas behind C# 3.0 and LINQ - these main-stream technologies are inspired by functional programming and the new C# 3.0 features give us definitely much more than just a new way to query databases. The book explains the ideas behind these features and shows how to use them more efficiently.
• Learning the F# language - F# is becoming a first-class citizen in the Visual Studio family of languages, which alone would be a good reason for learning it! Even if you're not going to use it for your next large .NET project, you'll find it useful for quick prototyping of ideas and testing how .NET libraries work thanks to the great interactive tools.
• Real world examples - the book includes a large set of real-world examples that show how to develop real applications in a functional way - both in F# and C#. Among other things, the examples show how to utilize multi-core CPUs, how to better obtain and process data and how to implement animations and GUI applications in a functional way.

The book is available via the MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) and if you want to get a better idea what is the book about, you can read the first chapter for free. Anyway, it is more than a month since I posted the announcement, so I decided to write a brief update....

Announcing: Real-world Functional Programming in .NET

If you’ve been reading my blog or seen some my articles, you know that I’m a big fan of the F# language and functional programming style. I’m also often trying to present a bit different view of C# and LINQ – for me it is interesting mainly because it brings many functional features to a main-stream language and allows using of many of the functional patterns in a real-world. Elegant way for working with data, which is the most commonly used feature of C# 3.0, is just one example of this functional approach. Talking about real-world applications of functional programming, there is also fantastic news about F#. It was announced last year that F# will become fully supported Visual Studio language and the first CTP version of F# was released this week!

I always thought that the topics mentioned in the previous paragraph are really interesting and that functional programming will continue to become more and more important. That’s why I’m really excited by the news that I’d like to announce today – I’m writing a book about functional programming in F# and C#....

Thesis: Client-side Scripting using Meta-programming

I realized that I haven’t yet posted a link to my Bachelor Thesis, which I partially worked on during my visit in Microsoft Research and which I successfully defended last year. The thesis is about a client/server web framework for F# called F# WebTools, which I already mentioned here and its abstract is following:

“Ajax” programming is becoming a de-facto standard for certain types of web applications, but unfortunately developing this kind of application is a difficult task. Developers have to deal with problems like a language impedance mismatch, limited execution runtime in web browser on the client-side and no integration between client and server-side parts that are developed as a two independent applications, but typically form a single and homogenous application. In this work we present the first project that deals with all three mentioned problems but which still integrates with existing web technologies such as ASP.NET on the server and JavaScript on the client. We use the F# language for writing both client and server-side part of the web application, which makes it possible to develop client-side code in a type-safe programming language using a subset of the F# library, and we provide a way to write both server-side and client-side code as a part of single homogeneous type defining the web page logic. The code is executed heterogeneously, part as JavaScript on the client, and part as native code on the server. Finally we use monadic syntax for the separation of client and server-side code, tracking this separation through the F# type system.

The full text is available here: Client side scripting using meta-programming (PDF, 1.31MB)

Lazy Computation in C# on MSDN

I think that one of the interesting things about C# 3.0 is that it gives you the ability to use many techniques known from functional languages (like Haskell or F#). Most of the articles about C# 3.0 and LINQ focus on the queries and LINQ to SQL, but I believe that using these functional techniques deserve some attention as well. This is why I'm very happy that my article about one of these techniques - representing lazy computations - is now available at the C# Developer Center. I would like to thank to Charlie Calvert [^], who is the Community Program Manager for C# and who edited and published my article there. Here is the annotation:

Most of the programming languages used in practice (including for example C#, VB.NET, C++, Python or Java) employ so called eager evaluation, which means that the program evaluates all expression and statements in the order in which they are written, so all the preceding statements and expressions are evaluated before executing the next piece of code. This, for example, means that all arguments to a method call are evaluated before calling the method. Sometimes it may be useful to delay an execution of some code until the result is actually needed, either because the result may not be needed at all (but we can’t tell that before executing some computation) or because we don’t want to block the program for a long time by executing all computations in advance and instead we want to execute the computations later, when we will actually need the result.

In this article we will look how these lazy computations can be written in C# (using some of the new language features from version 3.0). We will first implement a Lazy class to represent this kind of computation, then look at a few simple examples to demonstrate how the class can be used, and finally we will examine one slightly more complicated, but practically useful application.

You can read the complete article here: Lazy Computation in C# [^]

F# presentation at Czech .NET Group meeting

On 2nd of November I did a presentation on F# and functional programming at the Czech .NET User Group meeting. Because I spent quite a lot of time with puting the presentation together I wanted to make it available to wider audience, so I translated the slides and examples to English (anyway, translating the content took me only a few minutes :-)). In case that some of the readers prefer Czech version, I attached the original documents too.

In the presentation I tried to introduce some basic concepts of functional programming (immutable values, lazy evaluation) to the audience with no experience with functional programming, as well as present some of the most interesting features of F# (like strict type system based on type inference, .NET interoperability and metaprogramming). The whole contents of the presentation is following:

• Functional programming in F# - Introduction to the F# type system
• Some useful functional idioms - How to do Foldl/Map/Filter functions and Lazy evaluation in C#
• Interactive scripting - What is important for scripting, mathematical simulation
• Interoperability between F# and other .NET languages - How to use .NET libraries from F# and F# libraries from ohter .NET languages
• F# as a language for ASP.NET - How to use F# as a language for ASP.NET development
• Meta-programming in F# - Meta-programming features in F# and the FLINQ project

Downloads

• Presentation - Czech (889 kB), English (894 kB)
• Demos - Czech (500 kB), English (501 kB)

Slides and demos from F# presentation

This semester I attended Advanced .NET Seminar that was led by Tomas Matousek [^] who is one of the authors of Phalanger project [^] (Which is an amazing project by the way. It takes PHP source code and compiles it without any modification to .NET). Seminar was mostly focused on Rotor and .NET internals, so if you want to learn more about these topics you can look at Advanced .NET programming [^] slides (by Tomas Matousek).

I did one presentation at this seminar too. It was about the F# language developed at Microsoft Research. It was just a quick overview of F# features, because F# is very rich topic, so it coveres only the language (functional vs. imperative behavior), F# type system, compilation of F# constructs to .NET and interoperability with .NET (for example how to create windows forms application in F#). At the end, I also mentioned F# meta-programming that allows you to look at F# code as data.

• The F# language (67kB) - presentation slides in PDF
• F# Samples (54kB) - zipped VS 2005 solution with samples

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