Today at DDD Melbourne I gave an introductory presentation on F#, .NET’s general purpose functional programming language.

The abstract for the talk is:

Are you a C# programmer that loves the power and fluency of libraries like LINQ and RX? Do you sometimes find it difficult to write your own expressive, clean, reliable and concurrent code? Have you looked at functional programming and been terrified by math symbols and scary sounding words like "monad" and "category theory"?

In this talk we'll introduce and discuss how to use F# and functional programming techniques to write that cleaner, more expressive and reliable code that you've always wanted; and we promise not to descend into crazy math symbols!

I’ve uploaded the source code and slides to a GitHub repository, so you can examine the awesome in your own time and get excited… in private. :)
I’ve also fixed the copy and paste bug that Mahesh pointed out on Twitter. Can’t let a little typo stand! :)

To compile the SQLClient type provider code, you’ll need to install the AdventureWorksLT sample database to your own SQL Server instance. You can download it from Codeplex under the name “AdventureWorksLT2012_Data”. You can follow this guide on how to attach the downloaded MDF file to SQL Server (why Microsoft don’t provide a .BAK file to restore instead, I don’t know!)

To get started coding in F#, I recommend the following tools:

• Visual Studio 2013 – Make sure you update the included “Visual F#” extension to the latest version
• Visual F# Power Tools Extension
• F# Outlining Extension

To learn more about F#, I highly recommend:

• F# For Fun and Profit – F# and functional programming explained in simple understandable language – no crazy maths stuff
• Try F# – Online syntax tutorials and in-browser compiler
• The F# Software Foundation – The F# community hub; has links to videos, guides and commonly used libraries

F# people to follow on Twitter (obviously not exhaustive!):

• Don Syme – The Benevolent Dictator for Life of the F# language (he is its designer)
• Tomas Petricek – Super F# enthusiast and founding member of the F# Foundation
• Scott Wlaschin – Scott is the author of F# For Fun and Profit

Tonight I gave a short presentation at Devevening titled “Async/Await – The Edge Cases and Unit Testing”. Here’s the abstract:

In this talk we'll look at the new async await feature in C# 5, but we'll go beyond the typical toy examples and look at edge cases like exception handling, task cancellation and how we can approach unit testing asynchronous methods.

I’ve uploaded the source code and slides to a BitBucket repository, so for those who want to inspect the examples at their own leisure, please clone away:

• Source code (specifically revision 394d1e3cf9f5 was used in this talk)
• Presentation slides

I hope to make an extended version of the talk and present that at a future user group; I’d like to cover things in a little more detail, look at the history of async over the life of the .NET Framework, cover unit testing a bit more thoroughly, and maybe even take a peek under the covers at what the compiler generates when you write an async method. Stay tuned!