This tutorial will be organised around learning the building blocks of F#, real world functional programming principles, and platform compatibility.
"Hello Seagull" - A first glimpse of F#
Beyond the REPL - A relaxing Visual Studio 2010 rubdown
The Power of Types - A distinct lack of unpleasant surprises
Asynchrony and Concurrency - Be lazy, it works so you don't have to
Monadic Magic - A frosty gulp of language oriented programming
Tour de F# - Enjoy the fruits of others' hard work
What can attendees expect? A thorough introduction to F#, one of the most powerful languages available for real world development. Come dive into the building blocks of functional programming, swim around with the safety and convenience of type inferred statically checked code, and glide through F#'s impressive array of libraries.
General. All programmers are welcome. Come with curiosity and an open mind. Those at any level of functional programming or F# experience will enjoy this session.
Any non-express Visual Studio 2010 installation comes with F#, just as long as it wasn't deselected during installation.
On Windows, you need to download and install Visual Studio 2010 Shell (integrated mode). After installing Visual Studio 2010 Shell the next step is to download and install the F# Standalone package. To do this just go to the F# MSDN portal and click "Get the F# Standalone and VS2008 CTP". After that, scroll to the bottom of the page, click the download button for "InstallFSharp.msi" and run it.
If you don't already have a recent version of Mono installed, you'll need to get it. This process varies from platform to platform, please see this page for more information.
Next, you'll need to install F#. This requires downloading two things: the F# standalone package and the Mono key file.
Download the F# standalone package, fsharp.zip, from
here.
Download the Mono Key from here.
Unarchive fsharp.zip, copy mono.snk to the location F# was unarchived
to, and run install-mono.sh. This script will install F# assemblies into
the Mono GAC and ensure correct permissions.
To use F#, from the unarchived FSharp directory, run mono bin/fsi.exe for the interactive window (REPL) and mono bin/fsc.exe to
compile from source.
is a Microsoft MVP for the F# programming language. Through writing, speaking and running events, Richard hopes to help bridge the gap between the cutting edge in computation and the mainstream software engineer. Currently, Richard works as a Software Architect specializing in digital image processing at Atalasoft, Inc. He also leads the New England F# User Group and is anxiously awaiting the release of his first book, Professional F# 2.0.