F# Weekly #8, 2014

24/02/201424/02/2014F# Weekly1 Comment

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

Vote for F# direct support in Unity3d if you like this idea.
CloudSharper Local alpha 0.9.6 was released.
New version of F# formatting can now evaluate scripts and embed the results.
F# portable library project template is available now!
RegexProvider got a new home.
Pigeon library has an F# sample.
FrontlineSolver say that their product “will be extremely F# friendly, following the idioms of the language“
WebSharper 2.5.98 was released.

Video/Presentations

“When Code Reacts to Data” by Jessica Kerr.

Blogs

Adam Granicz posted “Update: Showing compiler errors“.
Antonio Lucca wrote “Animal Quiz problem in F#“.
Robert Sweeney presented “A C# developer’s take on F#: Discovery to Production“.
Jamie Dixon blogged “Trigrams and F#“.
Larry O’Brien posted “Review of my Xamarin F# Event Code Leads To Improvements“.
Isaac Abraham wrote about “Introducing HadoopFs – F# for Hadoop“.
Ross McKinlay presented “The Don Syme type provider“.
Neil Danson wrote “Book Review: F# for Quantitative Finance“.
Tao Liu wrote “F# Code Snippet Updated“.(extension)
logicchains posted “Memory Access Microbenchmark: Clojure, F#, Go, Julia, Lua, Racket, Ruby, Self…“.
Steffen Forkmann blogged “FAKE 2.10 released – more stuff for Dynamics NAV, Windows Azure, FTP, Nuget“.
James D’Angelo wrote “Simple.Web F# Project IPathUtility Fix“.

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #7

F# Weekly #7, 2014

16/02/2014F# Weekly1 Comment

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

Highlighting usage (+operators) and navigation bar came to F# Power Tools.
F# addin v3.2.23 for MonoDevelop and Xamarin Studio is released (Support for rename refactoring, highlight references and more).
Fmat (an open source numerical library) is on NuGet now.
F# 3.0 package for Debian is now available.
Follow @bayardrock for updates on the iPython Notebook support for F#
New version of SQLProvider is on NuGet with an experimental MS Access support.
New release of F# mode for Emacs.

Video/Presentations

“F# for the client – from WPF to iOS” by James Moore and Reed Copsey, Jr.
“F# in Social Gaming” by Yan Cui.
“Information-Rich Programming in F# with Semantic Data” by Steffan Staab and Martin Leinberger.
Deedle: Effective Data & Time Series Analysis with Tomas Petricek

Blogs

Don Syme announced “PhD/Masters-level Internship Positions at Microsoft Research, Cambridge“.
Adam Granicz posted “CloudSharper Local alpha available“.
Dave Thomas blogged “Danger Unstable Structure – No More!“.
Jamie Dixon posted “Analysis of Health Inspection Data using F#“.
Kunjan Dalal wrote “ServiceStack F# template Update. Circle is Complete“.
Neil Danson published “Building a C# compiler in F#“.
Karlkim Suwanmongkol wrote about “Recursion and Tail-recursion in F#“.
Mikael Helldén posted “An F# School Book Example“.
Larry O’Brien blogged “Notes on my first real F# program“.
Kunjan Dalal wrote “ServiceStack F# template. Starting from the Start“.
Larry O’Brien published “On parentheses in F#“.
Ross McKinlay wrote about “Fun with a toy robotic arm!“.
Robert Nielsen blogged “Monad bind operator for function composition, part 1 of 2“.
Simon Cousins posted “Does the Language You Use Make a Difference (revisited)?“.
Mathias Brandewinder wrote “Amoeba Optimization Method using F#“.
Julie Lerman published “Data, Meet My New Friend, F#“.

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #6

F# Weekly #6, 2014

10/02/2014F# Weekly1 Comment

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

Json.NET 6.0 was released with F# Support.
Happy birthday FAKE – 4 years with 2788 commits and 53 contributors!!!
Power Tools for Visual Studio was announced (available in VS gallery). Do not be shy to join to make it better!
Do not miss new manager-focused “Why F#” page!
fszmq (F# binding for the ZeroMQ) version 4.0.4 was released with a shiny new website.
Do not miss home of F# Coding Dojos.
Use numl machine learning from F# – sample.
LinqOptimizer 0.5.2 is on NuGet, with a brand new tuple elimination algorithm (for F# and C#).
F# step-by-step guides + articles by Eriawan Kusumawardhono.
Code completion with a jQuery Mobile app in F# with WebSharper.
FancyFS: Static parameters work on routes.
WebSharper.Highcharts is on NuGet now.
FSharp.Data is finally compatible with Win and Mono (Thanks to Gustavo Guerra).

Video/Presentations

“Data Workflows for Machine Learning” by Paco Nathan.

Blogs

Mathias Brandewinder blogged “Re-introducing Community for F#“.
Jamie Dixon wrote “Unit Testing F# Projects“.
Phil Brooks posted “Higher Order Functions in Excel“.
Calvin Bottoms presented “Polyglot Survival Guide: Erlang, Haskell, and F#“
Luke Sandell blogged “F# and Output Parameters“.
Kunjan Dalal posted “Getting started with Functional web“.
Kunjan Dalal posted “Asp.Net MVC5 with F#“.
Kunjan Dalal posted “When Servicestack meet F# via Side Waffle“.
Anton Tayanovskyy wrote “Deterministic parallelism with logging“.
Will Pleasant-Ryan published “Resource Roundup: Getting Started with F#“.
Mike Hadlow wrote about “On Undefined“.
Karlkim Suwanmongkol blogged “Learning F# with F# Succinctly by Robert Pickering“.
David Tchepak posted “Splitting responsibilities by abstracting type details“.
Robert Nielsen wrote “New free editor for F# (Visual Studio 2013 Express)“.
Isaac Abraham blogged “Azure Storage F# Type Provider – Now with Table Support“.
Dave Thomas decided to be “Detweeted“.

FsAdventJP

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #5

F# Weekly #5, 2014

03/02/2014F# Weekly2 Comments

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

Welcome new features for Xamarin F# addin (Refactor ->Rename and more)!
New up-for-grabs issues in FSharp.Formatting. (For those who want to learn some F# & contribute to a nice tool :-))
Ryan Riley presented “F#nctional Times“.
IPython notebook F# profile intellisence is better now than what’s in IPython standard.
“Calculating Cumulative Binomial Distributions” and “Asynchronous and Agent-based Programming” are new chapters to F# Deep Dives.
Richard Minerich presented F# template for Vindinium.
New documentation for “F# Formatting: Command line tool” is available.
Using F# Units of Measure in a temperature converter on .NET Fiddle.
SQLProvider 0.0.5-alpha is out on NuGet with MySQL and Oracle support.
Srdjan Strbanovic shared collection of resources about Functional Programming.
BlueMountain Capital Management COO is recognized as 14 in the Institutional Investor Trading Tech Top 40, and Deedle gets a mention. Congratulations!
New screenshot: Integrated API docs in upcoming CloudSharper and Technical documentation in CloudSharper.
Fredis (a BookSleeve wrapper for convenient usage from F#) was presented.
Canopy 0.9.3 is now available with a few fixes and features!
Battleship type provider was announced.
Ideas for new type providers:
- Academic Torrents
- Agricultural Research Data

Video/Presentations

“F# in action: playing functional Conway’s game of life” by Vagif Abilov.
“New libraries for Client Side development in F#” by Reed Copsey.
“F# for Fun and Games” with Anthony Brown.
“Information-Rich Programming in F# with Semantic Data” by Steffen Staab.

Blogs

Yan Cui blogged “Introducing, DSLs to query against Amazon CloudWatch metrics“.
Craig Stuntz wrote “Let’s Build a Compiler… In F#!“.
Christian Horsdal posted “In Search of Maybe in C#“.
Jack Fox blogged “Combining FsCheck Properties in a single Test“.
Joe Mayo wrote “Using LINQ to Twitter with F#“.
Anthony Brown posted “Solving interview problems in F#“.
Ross McKinlay presented “The amazing Squirrelify type provider“.(The world’s first ever use of an infinite (ie. unbounded) number of nominal type definitions.)
Nice blog on modelling electric circuits in F# programming, using units-of-measure.
Yan Cui updated “Performance benchmarks updated” (+Jil JSON serializer).
Cameron Taggart posted “Source Link to CodePlex“.
Jamie Dixon wrote about “Basic Insert Operation Using F#“.
Ross McKinlay presented “The MineSweeper Type Provider“.
Steffen Forkmann blogged “FAKE 2.8 released – DotCover and TestFlight support“.
Jorge Tavares posted “F# Impressions“.

FsAdventJP

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #4

F# Weekly #4, 2014

26/01/2014F# Weekly1 Comment

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

Visual Studio FSharp Team announced Visual F# Tools 3.1.1, with support for Desktop and Web express!
Do not forget to like and follow a new F# Facebook page if you like F#.
Welcome a new “F# |> I❤” bumper sticker! Buy from Zazzle UK or US.
The F# compiler services project (aka Foslyn :-)) now has basic API documentation.
Code formatting is now working on Xamarin Studio! This feature is coming soon.
Yeppp pre-release is on NuGet!
Now you can use VegaHub with Canopy!
Do not miss WebSharper D3 binding.
SqlProvider supports MySQL now.
You can play with MathNet.Numerics on .NET Fiddle.
Check out some of F# events scheduled across Europe & US.
Nessos S.A. now has its own GitHub page.
Yan Cui presented a Rx based client library for working with Amazon Kinesis.
Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 was released.
FSharpx.Collections docs now have a “Go to source” link (Thanks to a new version of FSharp.Formatting)
Kaggle is now a listed supporter of the F# Software Foundation.
Fun discussion with some C# folk. “I’m not sure what you mean by a type provider“.
A new release of SqlCommandProvider! (Support for json serialization of ResultType.Records in WebAPI)
Fleece 0.1 was released (a JSON mapper for F#).
Foq 1.5 was released.

Video/Presentations

“F# in action: playing functional Conway’s game of life” by Vagif Abilov.
“A Functional Architecture with F#” PluralSight course by Mark Seemann.
“Don’t fear the Monad” by Brian Beckman.
“The Future of C#” by Mads Torgersen.

Blogs

Anton Kropp wrote “Checking if a socket is connected“.
Steffen Forkmann posted “FAKE 2.6 released – support for TravisCI“.
James D’Angelo shared “JSON Web Token (JWT) with Simple.Web – Part 2 (Cleanup)“.
Phil Trelford blogged “Parsing C#“.
Tomas Petricek translated “Advent Art: Generating Hokusai paintings“.
Stefan Alfbo posted “Microsoft Translator Api“.
Jérémie Chassaing published “F# Poker Kata par Jérémie, Thomas et Damien“.
Mark Seemann wrote about “A Functional architecture with F#“.
Richard Dalton blogged “Annotate your code with TestCases“.
Gary Evans posted “MOOCs“.
Taha Hachana ‏wrote “Creating Dynamic Charts with FsPlot“.
Cameron Taggart blogged “Code your TFS builds in F# instead of XAML“.
Jeffrey Sax presented “CUDA Support Preview“.

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #3

F# Weekly #3, 2014

19/01/201427/01/2014F# Weekly3 Comments

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

F# is now available in .NET Fiddle (Live Validation, IntelliSense, Share and Collaborate). Try F# on any device!
F# plugin for Light Table was announced.
A new site “Community for F#” was published.
FSharp.Configuration was announced (collection of Type Providers used for project configuration). Look at and jump in!
Meet a new project “Excel Financial Functions” under fsprojects.
Taha Hachana presented a search engine for looking up the arguments of R functions when using RProvider.
VegaHub was published on NuGet with new docs.
Latest beta version of FSharp.Formatting uses the new simpler compiler services API(FSharp.Compiler.Service). Check it out and report any issues!
FSharp.Compiler.Service 0.0.11 is on NuGet! Do not miss a new sample – Compiler Services: Project Analysis.
ExtCore 0.8.40 was released! (Includes significant performance improvements for HashMap & HashSet)
Both Kiev and Lviv hosted F# events last week.
Microsoft Search Scientist declares that F# is great for data science scripting.
Google glass C#/F# SDK was presented by Xamarin.
A new version of SqlCommandProvider was released with AllParametersOptional config property.

Video/Presentations

“SQL Provider” by Ross McKinlay. (slides)
“FCell 2.0 Demo” by StatFactory. (Combining F# with Excel to get Async UDFs, Object Handlers and Type Providers).
“Introduction to F#” by César López-Natarén.
“Haskell vs. F# vs. Scala” by Prabhat Totoo, Pantazis Deligiannis, Hans-Wolfgang Loidl. (read more)

Blogs

Daniel Mohl wrote “A Project Template Wizard Via NuGet“.
Jamie Dixon posted “Traffic Stop Disposition: Classification Using F# and KNN“.
Steffen Forkmann announced “FSharpx.Collections 1.9 released“.
Scott Wlaschin blogged “Commentary on ‘Roman Numerals Kata with Commentary‘”.
Jean-Claude Razafindrakoto wrote “Data frame : the basic data structure that any data scientist should master“.
Steffen Forkmann announced “FSharp.Configuration 0.1 released“.
Cameron Taggart posted “SourceLink.Fake available“.
Ross McKinlay shared “Visualizing LINQ with GraphViz“.
James D’Angelo wrote “JSON Web Token (JWT) with Simple.Web“.
Juan M Gómez blogged “Using FSharp with OrchardCMS“.
Ollie Riches wrote about “Simple F# REPL in WPF – part 4“.
Mathias Brandewinder presented “Version 0.1 of Charon, a F# Random Forest“.
Liam McLennan posted “Applying Functional Programming to .net Consulting Projects“.
Sergey Tihon blogged “F# Kung Fu #3: Exceptions recap“.

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #2

Building an “actor” in F# with higher throughput than Akka and Erlang actors

19/01/201419/01/2014F#Leave a Comment

Amazing post!!!

Zach Bray's blog

Building an “actor” in F# with higher throughput than Akka and Erlang actors

The “Big Data” problem

Our free lunch is over!

The number of transistors in our CPUs is still increasing like Moore’s law predicted. However, the frequency of our chips is flat-lining. We can no longer expect to see a 2x or even 1.5x performance improvement every 18 months from code that doesn’t exploit parallelism.

“Big Data” has arrived

According to Cisco we are now in The Zetabyte Era.

Global IP traffic has increased eightfold over the past 5 years.
Globally, mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold between 2011 and 2016.

The Economist ran an article in 2010 on what some are calling “the industrial revolution of data”.

Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics.
This industry is estimated to…

View original post 2,148 more words

F# Kung Fu #3: Exceptions recap.

19/01/201419/01/2014F#, Tips and Tricks1 Comment

Define

Usually, you do not need to define custom exceptions during programming in F#. If you do scripting in F#, in the most cases you will be happy with standard .NET exception types and F# built-in helper functions. But when you create a custom library or design complex enterprise software, you will need to use power of .NET exceptions. How you can do it from F#:

// C# style exception (possible, but not recommended)
type MyCsharpException(msg, id:int) =
  inherit System.Exception(msg)
  member this.Id = id

// F# style exceptions
exception MyFsharpSimpleException
exception MyFsharpException of string * int

Note that F# has a special keyword exception for defining “handy” exceptions.

Raise(Throw)

F# provides set of functions (failwith, failwithf, invalidArg, invalidOp, nullArg) that help to raise most common exceptions. They are very convenient especially for F# scripts.

let rnd = System.Random()

let rnd = System.Random()

let raiseException() =
    match rnd.Next(8) with
    | 0 -> failwith "throws a generic System.Exception"
    | 1 -> failwithf "throws a generic Exception with formatted message (%d)" 1
    | 2 -> invalidArg "_" "throws an ArgumentException"
    | 3 -> invalidOp "throws an InvalidOperationException"
    | 4 -> nullArg "throws a NullArgumentException"
    | 5 -> raise <| MyFsharpException("throws a MyFsharpException", 5)
    | 6 -> raise <| MyCsharpException("throws a MyCsharpException", 6)
    | 7 -> assert (2>1)
    | _ -> raise <| System.Exception("Impossible case")

The assert expression is syntactic sugar for System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert. The assertion is triggered only if the DEBUG compilation symbol is defined.

Try-With/Finally (Catch)

The last step is to catch exceptions and handle them in a proper way.

let catchException() =
    try
        raiseException()
    with
    | Failure(msg) // 'Failure' active pattern catches only Exception objects
     -> printfn "%s" msg
    | MyFsharpException(msg, id)
     -> printfn "Catch F# exceptions using pattern matching"
    | : ? System.ArgumentException as ex
     -> printfn "Invalid argument '%s'" ex.ParamName
    | : ? MyCsharpException | : ? System.InvalidOperationException
     -> printfn "You can handle multiple exceptions at a time"
    | _ as ex
     -> printfn "Log: exception '%s'" (ex.GetType().Name)
        reraise() // re-raise exception

let finaly() =
    try
        catchException()
    finally
        printfn "Now, I am ready for exceptions!"

‘: ?‘ is a two-symbol operator without space inside.

Note:

Failure active pattern catches only System.Exception objects. It is useful to handle exceptions raised by failwith & failwithf functions.
Exceptions defined using exception keyword could be handled automatically using pattern matching.
F# provides reraise function that helps to raise a current exception one more time. This function can be used only from pattern matching rules of try-with expressions.

If you want to learn more about exceptions, read an amazing The “Expressions and syntax” series from Scott Wlaschin.

F# Weekly #2, 2014

13/01/2014F# Weekly1 Comment

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

Now you have an ability to subscribe to F# Weekly by email.
You can join F# community on Gittip right now!
On the next week .NET Fiddle will release a new version with F# integration.
Learn more about the FSharp.Compiler.Service project and follow @FSCompService.
FSharp.Compiler.Service 0.0.3-alpha is now on NuGet.
Fantomas v1.0.5 was released with full F# 3.1 support, Mono compatibility, various improvements and bug fixes.
F# code formatting is coming soon to Xamarin Studio!
FrankFs just turned 2.0.0! Check out the new and improved docs.
Yan Cui introduced log4net.Kinesis, a log4net appender for Amazon Kinesis.
Rare event: Bug was found in F# compiler.
FAKE needs a cool logo. Any ideas?
Apparently, Don Syme is less an F# aficionado than Tomas Petricek.
New Functional South Coast (Southampton) user group was registered.
There are plenty of ways to join or contribute to WebSharper.
Love F# and Sublime Text? Philip David Harvey needs help finishing his F# autocomplete plugin.
Stanford CoreNLP for .NET was updated up to v3.3.1.
New version of LinqOptimizer 0.4.8 is on NuGet (C# and F# versions)
ExtCore 0.8.40 was released (Including significant performance improvements for HashMap & HashSet).
New F# code sample was posted on Rosetta Code.
An onsite training course “Functional Programming with F# .NET Training Course” is available from JJB International.
James Freiwirth shared PerfectShuffle.OAuth (A simple OAuth 2.0 implementation)
Ollie Riches works on Simple WPF F# Repl.
Vasily Kirichenko works on YamlTypeProvider.
Light Table is open source and ready for F# integration.
Interested in AutoCAD development with F#? Read these.

Blogs

Phil Trelford posted “Small Basic Compiler“.
Jamie Dixon blogged:
- “Setting up an OData Service on WebAPI2 to be used by F# Type Providers“.
- “Traffic Stop Analysis Using F#“.
Visual Studio FSharp Team shared “Seattle user group, Feb 13: F# on iOS with Xamarin Studio and Mac“
Tomas Petricek blogged “Coeffects: The next big programming challenge“.
Jack Fox wrote about “Transparent Heterogeneous Parallel Async with F#“.
Phil Trelford posted “Extending Small Basic with Function Procedures“.
Michael Newton wrote “Type Provider ProTip“.
Sergey Tihon announced a new service “Subscribe to F# Weekly by Email“.
Gordon Hogenson prepared “Excel automation in F#” links collection.
Jeffrey Sax wrote “Data Frame Library Preview“.
Terje Tyldum posted “F# charting challenge“.
Sergey Tihon blogged “F# Kung Fu #2: Custom Numeric Literals“.
Dawid Kowalski posted “F#, Deedle and Computational Investing“
James D’Angelo wrote “Simple.Web F# Project Template Updates“.
Dave Fancher posted “The Book of F#: Early Access!“
Chao-Jen Chen blogged “F#: Connect to InteractiveBrokers via ActiveX“.
Yan Cui write “Filbert v0.2.0 – performance improvement on decoding“.

FsAdventJP

ImmutableArray in F#

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

Previous F# Weekly edition – #1

Sergey Tihon's Blog

Pi-hole DNS on UGOS PRO 1.6.0.2917

F# Weekly | Behind The Scenes

New IKVM 8.2 & MavenReference for .NET projects

Announcing OpenXML Package Explorer for VS Code

`dotnet watch` with Microsoft.Identity.Web or custom IDistributedCache

ML.NET Recommendation Engine: Pitfall of One-Class Matrix Factorization

Introducing Clippit, get your slides out of PPTX.

HashiCorp Vault and TLS Certificate Authentication for .NET Applications (Comprehensive guide)

Be better WPF / MvvmLight developer in 2018

IIS hosted products (Office Online Server) monitoring with Application Insights Status Monitor

F# Weekly #8, 2014

F# Weekly #7, 2014

F# Weekly #6, 2014

F# Weekly #5, 2014

F# Weekly #4, 2014

F# Weekly #3, 2014

Building an “actor” in F# with higher throughput than Akka and Erlang actors

Building an “actor” in F# with higher throughput than Akka and Erlang actors

The “Big Data” problem

Our free lunch is over!

“Big Data” has arrived

F# Kung Fu #3: Exceptions recap.

Define

Raise(Throw)

Try-With/Finally (Catch)

F# Weekly #2, 2014