Reminder- DC ALT.NET Meeting - 6/24/2008 - Applied Functional Programming with F#

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Just a reminder about tonight's DC ALT.NET meeting. I hope some from the FringeDC and the NoVA Language Group can make it out tonight as it's quite on topic.

The June meeting for DC ALT.NET has been set up for June 24th from 7-9PM. Check out our site and our mailing list as more information becomes available. Once again, I'd like to thank the Motley Fool for hosting the event as they did back in May. This month, I'll be covering Applied Functional Programming with F# as a continuation of the talks I've been giving lately. The beauty of this group like last month's topic of Lisp and this month's topic of F# is to step outside of the comfort zone, look to the outside for better approaches to doing things instead of the "What's new on MSDN" sessions that I hear about time and time again.

The information is as follows:

Location:

Motley Fool
2000 Duke Street
Alexandria, VA, 22314
Map Link

Applied Functional Programming with F#

Recently, I've been doing quite a few talks on the introduction to functional programming and F#. In this session, I hope to cover the basics in short order once again, but also to show the applicability of where this language really hits the right areas. Are we going to immediately flock towards F# and abandon C# and other languages for all of your coding needs? No, but we have definite areas where F# and functional programming excels.

With this talk, I plan to focus on the following:

Functional Programming Basics
Custom Workflows
Async and Parallel Workflows
Mailbox Processing
Language Oriented Programming
Quotations and Expression Trees
Pattern Matching and Active Patterns
F# with MPI and High Performance Computing

Of course I also plan to spend some time talking about the latest piece which is FsTest, a Domain Specific Language for unit testing in F#. This is an umbrella under a series of solutions for DSLs to describe how to test the behaviors of an F# application.

Going a Step Further

Since I've been covering concurrency with .NET lately, it has me thinking a bit about creating workshops to teach this on weekends. Instead the way we see Code Camps, Day of .NET events and so on, it's an aggregate of all sorts of topics, and not going as deep as I wish. So, instead, I'd like to rectify that situation to hold day long sessions to go deep in any given subject, much like they do with the Philly.NET group. More on this as I flush out the details, but I'd like to hear feedback if people are interested in this sort of thing.

Hope to see a great turnout tonight!

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