No. 1 the Foreach Loop Last weekend I attended JB Evian’s code camp in the l’Ardeche département in the south of France, just to the north of the Provence region that forms the south east part of the French Mediterranean coast. (I was very interested in visiting this area since my wife and I became begin fans of Nigel Farrell’s “A Place in the France”  and  “A Place in the France – Indian Summer” when we first move to France, Nigel’s problems seem to dwarf any we had and helped put things in perspective). Anyway the aim of the project was to create...

To coincide with the release the CTP release of F# Microsoft also released and early version “Solver Foundation”. Don Box described himself as being elated by its release. You can tell it’s an early version as it’s currently the only way to get it is part of “F# Optimization Modelling Language” sample on the MSDN code gallery. So what does optimization mean in this context? Simply put an optimization problem is the problem of finding the best solution from all feasible solutions. Or (slightly) more formally: Given a function “f” which takes a value from set “A” and transforms it to...

F# is on dotnetrocks again, this time it’s Amanda Laucher and Ted Neward’s turn to talk F# with Carl and Richard. I have to say of all the F# podcast there have been so far this is my favourite. Why? Amanda and Ted do a really great job of articulating what I’ve been thinking about F#, and functional programming in general, for some time now. I think this is because Amanda and Ted have a similar background to me – they both come from the world of line of business applications. This is interesting because if you read the marketing...

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been reading “Collective Intelligence” by Toby Segaram and I’m really enjoying in it. It’s different to a lot of programming books, in that rather than focusing a specific language or API it focus on a particular set of problems and shows techniques that can be used to crack them. For example I’ve known for a long time that it’s easy to create an abstract syntax tree (AST) in F#: /// Untyped expression tree type Expression =     | Multiply of Expression * Expression     | Add of Expression * Expression     | Subtract of Expression * Expression     | GreaterThan...

Well the F# T-shirt I ordered arrived last Thursday, meaning it took about a week or so after ordering: If you want to see me in it then you’ll have to wait for pictures of alt.net London (yes I know you probably can control yourself for that long).

Now that the F# CTP is out, you may be wondering what I think of it. Well I’m planning to tell you in a later post, first let me explain what I’ve been up to: If you’re a follower of this blog you’ve probably noticed that there hasn’t been a lot of activity lately (apart from the short announcement about JAOO.dk). This is largely due to the fact I’ve moved house and have been doing a lot of gardening and DIY lately. I haven’t been entirely slack on the code front, I’ve started a couple of new projects, which probably deserve...

As mentioned previously I’ll be attending a couple of conferences soon and mainly inspired by Amanda Launcher’s F#TW t-shirt I decided to print up an F# t-shirt of my own. I had more ideas for designs that I could actually fit in my t-shirt draw, so I decided to make up a few designs and see if anyone else would like to buy them, you can see all the designs here. I’ve only just ordered my t-shirt and so I can’t vouch for the quality or service yet, but tshirtcity.com seems like a serious company and I’ll post an update...

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark, 28th September till 3rd October. I’ll speak on 1st October and I’ll actually be at the conference 29th September till 1st October attending sessions. The title of my presentation is “Learning F# and the Functional Point of View” and you can see the full abstract here. I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at conference were the other speakers include Martin Fowler, Anders Hejlsberg, and Erik Meijer, and I’m really looking forward to it. Feel free to drop me a...

The first half of this series the accent is on immutable programming, because in the first part of the series we had an introduction to immutable data, and in this second part we’re going to look in depth at immutable programming possibilities, with the idea of show that this is actually not too different to what your used. Once we’ve conquered the immutability we’ll start to dig into the concurrency. The main idea behind this post is take a look at everything that makes working with immutable data bearable, even likable.   Expressions and Returning Multiple Values (a.k.a. Tuples) In F# everything is...

When asking the question how does functional programming help me with concurrent programming? The standard response tends to be functional programming use immutable data structures, read-only data structures can be shared between threads without issues, end of problem. Except it isn’t. Immutable data structures have a different set of problems associated with them when working on concurrent problems. This post will examine what these problems are, and then show that this is just a special case of a more general set of problems when working with immutable data structures. Finally will start taking a look at how we solve some...