Microsoft Reiterates its Support of F#
Mads Torgersen and Philip Carter, respectively C# and F# program managers at Microsoft, published a post promoting the use of F#. The post is a follow-up to a presentation on F# at Build 2017. They talked about how Microsoft wants to remove obstacles to F# adoption and the F# improvements Visual Studio 2017 brings.
Details on F# Support in Rider
JetBrains’s developer evangelist Marteen Balliauw recently published more details about the F# support in Rider. Features are explained into more details than the general EAP announcement and also contains the plan for the next releases.
Zero Runtime Exceptions in Production with Elm
At QCon London 2017, Richard Feldman, software engineer at noredink and author of “Elm in Action” from Manning, explained how their decision to switch to Elm led to a 100,000 LOC system running in production with zero runtime exceptions since 2015. Here, we provide a brief summary of Feldman’s key points.
Building an F# Web Server with Freya
Freya is an F# web framework focusing on HTTP primitives and concurency. It doesn't include interface constructs such as templating. Marcus Griep presented Freya at F# eXchange 2017, where he explained its core model. He also showed the different mechanisms available for performance and concurrency, such as Hopac and Kestrel integrations.
Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference 2017: Day Two Recap
Day Two of the 12th annual Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference was held in Philadelphia. This two-day event included keynotes by Blair MacIntyre (augmented reality pioneer) and Scott Hanselman (podcaster), and featured speakers Kyle Daigle (engineering manager at GitHub), Holden Karau (principal software engineer at IBM), and Karen Kinnear (JVM technical lead at Oracle).
Visual Studio 2017 Brings F# 4.1
The Visual Studio 2017 release in early March included F# 4.1 and an update of the Visual F# tools. F# 4.1 brings improvements and interoperation with C# 7 while the tools are the first version supporting the Roslyn workspaces.
Fable 1.0 Beta Brings Better Tooling Integration, New Project Format, and More
F# to JavaScript compiler Fable has reached version 1.0 beta, bringing tooling improvements, a streamlined project format, and better code generation. InfoQ has spoken with Fable creator Alfonso García-Caro.
Microsoft's Plans for the Future of .NET
Microsoft develops C#, Visual Basic, and F# in public but doesn't always share its plans for these popular languages. Mads Torgersen has provided some new guidance on where Microsoft plans to take these languages in the future.
F# 4.1 Brings Improvements and Interoperation with C# 7
F# 4.1 brings improvements to the language. It is distributed through the Microsoft tools for F#, which are stated to ship later this year. This version enables support for struct tuples, interoperation with C# 7 and by-ref returns.
Testimonial on Using F# by Microsoft's Project Springfield Team
Project Springfield is a fuzz testing service for finding security critical bugs in software. William Blum, principal software engineering manager on the Springfield team at Microsoft Research, explains how adopting F# helped the team build the cloud service.
Scripting in F# Using Fake and Paket
Scripting in F# is usually done using .fsx files and F# Interactive (Fsi). For scripts that will be reused, Paket and Fake bring several features to handle different uses cases. Fake can be used to structure complex scripts, while Paket brings dependency management.
Introducing the F# Software Foundation Programs
The F# Software Foundation oversees all aspects related to F#. This includes the technical side as well as promoting the language and offering services to its members such as its mentorship program. InfoQ reached out to Reed Copsey, Jr., executive director of the foundation, to learn more about the foundation’s role and its programs.
Don Syme Presents F# Design Principles at .Net Fringe
Don Syme, creator of F#, presented at .Net Fringe 2016 an assessment of the current status of F#. He also commented on the duality that exists in F#, a functional language created on a runtime built for object oriented languages.
Transcompiling F# to Javascript with Fable
Fable is a F# to Javascript transpiler. It can compile an F# script or a whole F# project to Javascript. Fable is executed through a command line interface, giving the option to either compile an .fsx script or a whole project. It is distributed as an npm package.
Exploring Performance Counters with F# WMI Type Provider
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a primary source of data when monitoring Windows systems. Given that the performance counters available vary from machine to machine, a tool is needed to list all counters available. The WMI type provider is one possible option to explore WMI performance counters.
