First things first, a big thanks to the team at Skills Matter particularly Wendy and Anaïs for making this event happen.
This year the tutorials were held over 2 days in the atmospheric Crypt in Clerkenwell:
Expect a return next year in London and New York.
Day 1
Practical Functional-first Programming with F#
Friends don't let friends use null
An outstanding keynote from Don which built on the talk he gave at the Progressive .Net Tutorials earlier in the year, stacked full of nuggets. On measuring if you have a correctness problem in your code base Don suggests counting the occurrences of NullReferenceException in your bug database.
Don also demonstrated F# 3.0’s Type Provider feature, including a very interesting Hive type provider for Hadoop written by Matt Moloney.
Programming with the stars!
I generally avoid 'function' when showing the language to newcomers. Not a problem at #progfsharp :-)
i'm going to the Progressive F# Tutorials at #SkillsMatter Nov 1-2 intense coding with the greats of #Fsharp! http://bit.ly/SMprogFsharp
To demonstrate how to tackle problems with F#, Tomas & Nicolas neatly solved the Reversi kata live on stage. They started by transforming a board to a 2D array and then searched the array for legal moves.
F# Koans
Ready for some koans fun at #progfsharp!
The F# Koans are a simple, fun, and interactive way to learn the F# language through testing. You can run them from VS2010 or VS2012. My 10yo really enjoyed working his way through them.
Processing concurrent time-series data
See you at the Progressive F# Tutorials 2012 http://t.co/y1FG9GGe
Not to miss #fsharp events! Tutorials at #skillsmatter in 2 weeks & Type-providers and financial tutorial at #techmesh tomasp.net/blog/…
Simon worked through some of the techniques he has used while developing solution in F# at E.ON Energy Trading for the last 4 years. There was also some ASCII art…
Expert Panel Discussion
A very lively and fun debate, covering topics from industrial use of F#, cross-platform with Mono and the JVM, to data parallelism. Jon offered that several teams at Aviva, one of the world’s largest insurers, are using F#. Martin felt that F# on the JVM would be a smash hit. Finally Nick wetted our appetite for the upcoming release of {m}brace.
Day 2
Accelerate your TDD cycle – Coding dojo with NaturalSpec and NCrunch
yfrog.com/h4h4yzej turns out the whole "in the crypt" thing - not a joke. #progfsharp
In this session Steffen introduced TDD with F# using NaturalSpec and NCrunch.
Make Music in the Key of F#
@AnaisatSM thanks for having us, it really was a lovely event! /cc@skillsmatter @wendydevolder @ptrelford
Robert introduced Undertone a library for creating notes in F#, part inspired by Clojure’s Overtone. With the F# Koans under his belt my 10yo was able to translate the Baa Baa Black Sheep sample to Jingle Bells :)
F# in the Cloud
In this session, George and Gian demonstrated that F# can be used to perform computations in a cloud environment, using distributed actors, Azure Hadoop and the cool F# newcomer, {m}brace.
Web Programming
James started by talking through the F# MVC project template from Daniel Mohl.
After a short tea break I demonstrated some F# 3 type providers starting with accessing Stack Overflow’s API using the F# team’s OData type provider, followed by the file system and Freebase providers which are available in FSharpx via Nuget. Finishing up with a demo of the F# team’s B-Movie Madness sample web application which I’ve deployed on Azure.
James followed on with a site built using tube passenger statistics from TfL and a CSV type provider. Finally James demonstrated WebSharper compiling F# code directly to JavaScript.
Community Action
Thanks for stopping by, hope to see y’all at some of the upcoming fun F# community events: