F# Weekly #39-41, 2014

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from past weeks:

News

• The F# community have selected a great new logo!
• F# logo merchandise benefiting F# Software Foundation now on www.zazzle.com, www.zazzle.co.uk , and www.zazzle.co.uk/international.
• Paket – a new Package Dependency Manager for .Net – can now reference file dependencies directly from GitHub
• Please fill the Azure data services survey (e.g. if you want better F# support :-)).
• The F# Software Foundation is giving away stickers with the F# logo! If you run an F# user group, fill out the survey.
• Go to metadata is supported in the new release of Visual F# Power Tools.
• “Recommended Guidelines for F# Projects, Packages and Namespaces” from the F# Open Engineering Group.
• How a startup in the real-estate industry uses F# type providers to greatly simplify data access.
• Ariadne – an F# library for Gaussian Processes.
• MBrace framework is one of the 20 finalists selected by Founders Game.
• Elucidate – Literate Programming with Markdown for F#: Extension for Visual Studio.
• F# implementations of Todo-backend are now up.
• Visual Studio 2014 CTP is released.
• Announcing October 2014 Updates to .NET Framework vNext, ASP.NET vNext and .NET Native in Visual Studio “14” CTP4.

Videos/Presentations/Courses

• Creating cross platform mobile apps using F# and Xamarin with Bernard Hsu.
• Data science with F#: Social network analysis with Evelina Gabasova (slides & code).
• Building reactive, multi-view applications with WebSharper + UI.Next with Adam Granicz,
• Contributing to F# with Mårten Rånge.
• Vulpes: A functional approach to deep machine learning on the GPU with Rob Lyndon.
• Parsing APL for Static Analysis with Anders Schack-Nielsen.
• Trends in programming languages with Antya Dev.
• FunScript: Why bother? by Alfonso Garcia-Caro.
• F# in Finance 2013 – Keynote with Don Syme.
• F# in Finance 2013  with Jon Harrop.
• Bitcoin for F# Programmers by Andrew Sheppard.
• F# Expert Panel from F# in Finance 2013.
• FsLab: Doing data science with F# with Tomas Petricek.
• F# Type Providers: DBpedia and the Combinator Framework with Andrew Stevenson.
• FSCL: homogeneous programming and execution for heterogeneous platforms with Gabriele Cocco.

Blogs

• Consuming Azure ML web api endpoint from an array – Jamie Dixon.
• Little Performance Explorations: C++ – Sebastian Good.
• Xamarin.Forms and F# in a Minute – Troy Kershaw.
• Calling An F# Library From C# to Import A CSV File Into SQL Server – Tony Truong.
• Plotting F# Data Using Excel Interop: Soaring Life Expectancy Edition – Bernard Shoe.
• Preparing Azure Cloud Service for running F# Compiler Service – Simon J.K. Pedersen.
• One Week in F# – Phil Trelford.
• F# you’ve left me a broken man – Stephen Kennedy.
• F# Coding Breakfasts & Lunches: let’s code together! – Mathias Brandewinder.
• Faking a continuously Polling Consumer with scheduled tasks – Mark Seemann.
• Church numerals, .net and working around the value restriction – Carsten König.
• Aether — update – Andrew Cherry.
• Wake County Restaurant Inspection Data with Azure ML and F# – Jamie Dixon.
• Musical scales in F# – Alex Humphrey.
• F# data scripting – first experience – Matthias Weiser.
• Genetics, Evolution Of Color, And The French Revolution In F# Xamarin IOS – Bernard Hsu.
• Nykredit, the 33 million dollars mistake – Ramón Soto Mathiesen.
• F# Configuration and Logging for scripts – Matthias Weiser.
• Converting a small game from C# to F# part 2 – Andrea Magnorsky.
• F# Events From C# Application – Tony Truong.
• Why can’t C# become F#? – Adam Chester.
• F# : Currying – Dan Schnau.
• Who teaches functional programming? –  Swarat Chaudhuri.
• F#, Xamarin.Forms and Reactive UI – Brad Pillow.
• Smart Nerd Dinner – Jamie Dixon.
• Cutting Quotations Down to Size – Michael Newton.
• A list of references in machine learning and programming languages – Yin Zhu.
• Unboxing Functional Programming – Phil Trelford.
• Curried vs Uncurried Functions – Richard Dalton.
• C# 6 Cuts – Phil Trelford.
• Church numerals, .net and working around the value restriction – Carsten.
• Metricano – simplifying application monitoring – Yan Cui.
• To Xamarin with Love – Kunjan.
• On F# and Object Oriented Guilt – Eric Sink.
• F# – Imitating Erlang’s bit syntax for easier binary protocol implementation – Yan Cui.
• How to make your own F# logo – Ramón Soto Mathiesen.
• More F# Tourism: Europa F# 2014 – Mathias Brandewinder.

Paket – dependency manager for .NET & Mono! Paket is an alternative alternative dependency manager that replace nuget.exe in your repository and enables precise control over your dependencies. Features: Referencing files directly from GitHub repositories. Provide a control for indirect dependencies. Very fast dependency restore. Automatic migration from NuGet. Fixes some of NuGet design issues.

F# vNext News

• Recently accepted PRs:
  • “implementing “take”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “distinctby”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implement “distinct”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “last”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “pairwise”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “singleton”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “comparewith”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “imeplementing exactlyone” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “where”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “regularize collection functions” by Max Malook.
  • “add mapi2 to seq” by Patrick McDonald.
  • “add iteri2 to seq” by Patrick McDonald.
  • “add array.map3 and seq.map3” by Andrew Khmylov.
  • “implementing “countby”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “fold2”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “head”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “replicate”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “splitat”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “takewhile”” by Steffen Forkmann.
  • “implementing “tryhead”” by Rodrigo Vidal.
• Recently proposed PRs (please review and comment):
  • “extended if grammar part 1 of 2” by Marten Range.
  • “[wip] static quotation type resolve” by Don Syme.
  • “sortdescending and sortwith” by Patrick McDonald.
  • “better stack traces for async code” by Don Syme.
  • “simple optimizations for sha-1 calc” by Jack Pappas.
  • “optimizedclosures.fsharpfunc in seq” by Patrick McDonald.
  • “optimize dictionary lookups” by Jack Pappas.
  • “fix incorrect code gen for uom” by Vladimir Matveev.
  • “optimization for for-expression” by Marten Range.
  • “fix cross module inlining” by Vladimir Matveev.
  • “fix a memory leak in awaitwaithandle” by Pepeiborra.
  • “perf. optimization for seq.tolist” by Patrick McDonald.
  • “sortdescending and sortbydescending” by Richard Dalton.
  • “implement seq.sortwith” by Patrick McDonald.
  • “allow use of multi interface instan.” by Don Syme.
  • “optimization for array.sub” by Patrick McDonald.
• Recently proposed ideas:
  • Allow TypeProviders to supply location with errors.
  • The base keyword shouldn’t be a keyword.
  • Incorporate the Stream functions from Nessos/Streams into Core collections.
  • Add STM (Software Transactional Memory) feature into F# as language feature and into compiler as well.
  • Allow infinite numeric sequences.
  • Wildcard self identifiers.
  • Enhance ReflectedDefinition for pattern-matched let bindings.
  • Allow more flexible construction of structs.
  • Add Named States (an extension of record types).
  • Record types can be marked with the Struct attribute.
  • Add support for Haskell-style type annotations.
  • Implement OCaml’s new match/exception syntax.
  • IDE improvement.

New releases

• FSharp.Formatting and FSharp.Formatting.CommandTool v2.4.30.
• FSharp.Data v2.1.0 (with initial version of HtmlProvider).
• FSharp.Data.SqlClient v1.3.7.
• Visual F# PowerTools v1.5.2.
• CloudSharper v0.9.20.2.
• WebSharper UI.Next Version v0.1.31.32.
• WebSharper v2.5.127.
• FSharp.Core.Mono.Signed v3.1.1.27.
• FSharp.Control.Reactive v2.3.5.
• FSharp.Collections.ParallelSeq v1.0.2.
• FSharp.CloudAgent v0.1.
• FSharp.Numerics.FuzzyIntervals 0.0.3.
• Nu Game Engine v0.982.
• Simple.Wpf.FSharp.Repl v1.22.0.
• NLog.FSharp v3.1.0.
• Stacks.FSharp v1.0.0.

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #38