Yesterday I came across a handy loan payment calculator in C# by Jonathon Wood via Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew links. The implementation appears to be idiomatic C# using a class, mutable properties and wrapped in a host console application to display the results. I thought it’d be fun to spend a few moments re-implementing it in F# so it can be executed in F# interactive as a script or a console application. Rather than use a class, I’ve plumped for a record type that captures all the required fields: [...]

In the northern hemisphere summer is nearly open us, and to celebrate the F#unctional Londoners are putting on a series of 3 free hands on coding sessions. The sessions are open to all levels of experience (and operating systems), and I believe will be a great opportunity to pick up new skills or extend existing ones. So bring your friends, your partners, your kids and your laptops for some coding fun.   F#unctional Londoners   Fractal Forest Dojo – Thursday June 26th In this hands on session, we'[...]

When you want to set a date literal in F# (or C#) you create a new DateTime instance: let today = DateTime(2014,26,4) If you’re rocking VB.Net you get date literals which are checked at design & compile time: Dim d = #2014/04/26# I thought it’d be nice to add design and compile time checked date literals to F#, & throw in code completion for good measure. Enter F# Type Providers. No need to open millions of lines of compiler code, instead simply implement a class to provide the types & voilà: let[...]

Following up on the last Roslyn preview way back in 2012, this week saw the availability of a new preview with a more complete compiler along with a few new language features for C# and VB. A lot of inspiration for these features seems to have come from the F# language. The C# interactive shell from 2012 appears to be missing, perhaps ScriptCS is expected to fill this space, or you could just use F# interactive which already exists in Visual Studio. On the language features side, C# 6 gets primary const[...]

Microsoft’s Build 2014 conference is currently in full flow, one of the new products announced is Orleans, an Actor framework for Azure. There’s an MSDN blog article with some details, apparently it was used on Halo 4. Demis Bellot of ServiceStack fame, tweeted his reaction: .NET's actor model uses static factories, RPC Interfaces and code-gen client proxies for comms, WCF all over again: http://t.co/PyIq291Kvh — Demis Bellot (@demisbellot) April 3, 2014 I retweeted, as it wasn’t far off my initial[...]