F# Weekly #46, 2014

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

• Announcing a preview of Visual F# 4.0 on VS 2015.
• Announcing .NET 2015 Preview: A New Era for .NET.
• .NET Core is Open Source.
• A fantastic day for Visual F# – VS Community Ed. supports extensibility, so you can use Visual F# PowerTools on free stack.
• What do you want from the F# Software Foundation? Ask them here.
• F# group in Utah was announced.
• “Onikira, Demon Killer” – a game with an F# inside.
• Added is a section to “Recommended Guidelines for F# Projects” on cultural processing of strings.
• FeldSpar – F# test framework with a new UI test runner.
• Rachel Reese will join Jet.com in Jan.
• We need a type provider for JSON-LD.
• Type providers meet MBrace.
• The dependency manager Paket lets your project reference GitHub source as well as NuGet packages.
• Interactive web development with jQueryUI & WebSharper.
• Support for VS2015 preview included in the latest release of FSharpLint.
• FSharpSupport for ASP.NET vNext is on NuGet.

Videos/Presentations/Courses

• .NET 2015 & Managed Languages.
• Introducing F# For The Enterprise – Lincoln Atkinson.
• Taming GPU Threads with F# and Alea GPU – Dr. Daniel Egloff.
• Type providers (from the very beginning to the implementation) – Sergey Tihon.
• F# Streams – Gian Ntzik.
• Programming Games in F# – Andrea Magnorsky.

Blogs

• Does the Paradigm You Use Make a Difference? – Simon Cousins.
• Blogging with F# on GitHub Pages – Colin Bull.
• Adopting F# in a C# Shop – Jamie Dixon.
• Introducing Cricket (formerly FSharp.Actor) – Colin Bull.
• Introducing FsReveal – Beautiful, version controlled presentations in the browser – Steffen Forkmann.
• Self-hosted WebSharper application template available – WebSharper Core Team.
• Month of spreading F# love in Poland – Michał Łusiak.
• F# script reminder – Robert Nielsen.
• Progressive F# Tutorials London 2014 – Phil Trelford.
• Suave in a Docker container on MS Azure using Xamarin Studio and Mono on a Mac – Sebastian Fialka.
• Functional languages rack up best scores for software quality – Paul Krill.
• Solution to the prisoner puzzle

F# vNext News

• Recently accepted PRs:
  • Mutable values can be captured by closures now
  • Constructors are now treated as first-class functions
  • Better stack traces for async code.
  • Static arguments on provided methods
• Recently proposed PRs (please review and comment):
  • implement nameof operator
  • [prototype] [wip] local opens
  • fsharptest template projects
  • use array.subunchecked in array.fs
  • add nonstructuralcomparison ops
  • add tryunbox, isnull and option fns
  • cleanup referenceresolution.fs/fsi
  • add the multiprojectwizard
• Recently proposed ideas:
  • Display current parameter type in tooltip for generic function
  • Allow for completely in-memory compilation
  • Extended augmentations for functional types
  • Consider implementing static mixins to make the functional style more convenient in F#
  • add possibility to use custom hash code generation for types

New releases

• Paket 0.14.1 with new find-refs command, support for linking of HTTP files, better F# REPL support and use of Nuget v3 API.
• FsPickler v1.0.4 with ExceptionDispatchInfo serialization support in the CLR.
• FSharp.TypeProviders.StarterPack v1.1.3.52.
• FSharp.Compiler.Service v0.0.79.
• fsharp-mode (20141111.906)

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #45