F# Weekly #24-#25, 2014

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

• The F# Core Open Engineering Group has a revamped website and a blog. Please follow for updates!
• F# Nation – 1 week to submit to CUFP this year! Submit your experiences of using F# for real commercial work.
• Update on the F# logo project. Let’s keep the discussion going, and make sure we get the best logo possible! Please chime in with any feedback!
• Paris F# conference is in less than 10 days, with a full day of F# and workshops! Get your ticket now!
• Regular reminder to F# speakers to join INETA. They’ll partially reimburse travel expenses to speak!
• Miguel de Icaza shared “F# with Xamarin, getting started page“.
• A lot of great F# content is coming your way somewhere on the planet!
• Did you know that the msdn library includes F# syntax for many types in the BCL?
• FAKE 3.0 alpha is released. Please test the new FAKE with your build scripts especially if you are using additional fsi arguments. New version is built on top of FSharp.Compiler.Service and does not have external fsi process anymore.
• Major rewrite of FsPickler supporting binary, xml and json formats was pushed to prerelease channel. (+new microbenchmarks)
• Nashville F# Group was registered.
• First Sydney F# UG meeting was announced.
• Visual F# Power Tools 1.2.0 is released with Union pattern match case generation & important fixes for performance and memory issues.
• Dmitry Morozov presented FSharp.Data.SqlEnumProvider.
• FsEye 2.10 is released with NuGet packages and DataGridView plugin.
• New version of fszmq 4.0.6 is released.
• Stanford.NLP.NET packages were updated up to v3.4.
• Longing for a lint tool for F#? Check out this ongoing work.
• CloudSharper 0.9.13 is out with better NuGet support and workspace cloud sharing.
• New FsXaml and FSharp.ViewModule are published to NuGet. WPF via F# with clean, functional style validation is now supported.
• FeldSpar(Opinionated Purely Functional Unit Test Framework) was presented.
• Adam Granicz presented Three.js samples with WebSharper.
• Developing for Android and for Apple iOS/iPhone/iPad with F# just became a whole lot simpler.
• Chapter 12 “Software Quality” is new to F# Deep Dives.
• RexPro client in F# is released.
• F# support for iOS8 (via Xamarin.iOS) is released.
• F# Azure Storage Type Provider v1.0 is released!
• Everyone on the Visual F# Tools team uses The F# Power Tools!
• FSCL now fully supports OpenCL execution of Array.map, map2, mapi, mapi2, rev, sum, reduce and all the compositions.
• MathNet.Numerics 3.0 released is released with improved F# support.

Core and Lang News

• Don Syme have begun filtering smaller items on the F# User Voice with a view to F# 4.0 and beyond. Please contribute!
• What should the F# team be working on? Please vote on the issues.
• Want to hack on the F# compiler? Would you like to build F# 4.0? Here are issues and tasks:
  • Compiler should warn on missing class-level or assembly-level [<ExtensionAttribute>].
  • Improve the preprocessor to allow extended #if grammar.
  • Add support for “fixed”.
  • Enable a compiler warning when a recursive algorithm is not tail-recursive.
  • Steal nice println syntax from Swift.
  • Make the .Tag property public in DUs.
• Do you need extra templates in visual F#? They are open source and can be modified and added to right now!
• Fixed compiler bug:”F# interop with C# class that has an optional nullable parameter set to anything but null causes NullReferenceException / AccessViolationException“.
• Closed: “double backtick escaped identifiers for active patterns compiler bug”.
• Accepted pull request: “support profile78\profile259“.
• Vasily Kirichenko works on “Resolve unopened namespace or module“.

Video/Presentations

• Type Provider to Azure with Isaac Abraham.
• Like a rabbit in headlights! Removing the OO goggles with F# by Andrea Magnorsky.
• Domain Modelling in F# with Ian Russell.
• Early Warning Indicators in F# with Stephen Channell.
• Mixing biology and physics to understand stem cells and cancer with Ben Hall.
• Break Free With Managed Functional Programming with Dave Fancher.
• iOS App Development with F# and Xamarin by Rachel Reese.
• F# and Reactive Programming for iOS with Brad Pillow.
• Clash of the Lambdas by Aggelos Biboudis, Nick Palladinos and Yannis Smaragdakis.
• Type Theory and Practical Application by Jack Fox
• Syntax Matters: Writing abstract computations in F# by Tomas Petricek and Don Syme.
• Quantum Computing Research at Microsoft  by Dave Wecker.
• FeldSpar Setup by Jason Kerney.
• FeldSpar BasicTests by Jason Kerney.

Blogs

• Visual F# Tools Team posted “How to Contribute to the F# Compiler/Library Implementation“.
• James Conway posted “Functional Vindaloo“.
• Mike Bluestein shared “Xamarin 3 Delivers Rich Updates to Xamarin Studio“.
• Jon Wood wrote about “Exercism F# Track Now Available“.
• Evelina Gabasova blogged “Comparing F# and C# with dependency networks“.
• Peter Strøiman posted “Getting Started with FSpec“.
• Sebastian Bełczyk wrote about “Running F# self hosted WebAPI with Owin“.
• Tahir Hassan posted “Embedding F# In PowerShell“.
• Mårten Rånge presented “Monadic Scenario Testing“.
• Evelina Gabasov wrote about “Setting up R.NET on Mac“.
• Steffen Forkmann posted “FAKE 2.18 released – RoundhousE kick edition“.
• Piet Amersfoort blogged “Creating real world WPF applications with F# and Prism 5 (part 1)“.
• Lincoln Atkinson posted “Rethinking findstr with F# and Powershell“.
• Jamie Dixon wrote:
  • F# For Quantitative Finance
  • TRINUG F# Analytics SIG Prep
• Chris Ballard shared “Google API – a decoder for polylines in F#“.
• Tom Janssens blogged:
  • Functors, Applicatives and Monads for Csharp Developers
  • Functors, Applicatives and Monads for CSharp Developers – Part 2
• Tim Jones wrote “Writing a MiniC-to-MSIL compiler in F# – Part 3 – Semantic analysis“.
• Mathias Brandewinder blogged “How F# cured my 2048 addiction“.
• John Reynolds posted:
  • High performance large integers in .NET
  • Mpir.NET – NuGet package for high performance large integers
• Larry O’Brien shared “iOS 8, Scene Kit @ 60FPS, programmed in F#, using Xamarin.iOS“.
• Jon Wood blogged “Why F# for the Enterprise“.
• Isaac Abraham posted “F# Azure Storage Type Provider v1.0 released!“.
• Yan Cui published “Dart – Emulating F#’s Discriminated Union (i.e. an algebraic data type)“.
• nenono wrote about “Y-Combinator, recursive functions and memoization“.
• masuda wrote:
  • Try F# on Raspberry Pi.
  • Moving the RaspberryPi + BrickPi + LOGO Mindstorms EV3 using F #

That’s all for now.  Have a great week.

Previous F# Weekly edition – #23