I was fortunate enough to make it to the Microsoft MVP summit this year. I didn't learn anything secret (and even if I did, I wouldn't tell you!) but one thing I did learn is that there is a lot of interest in data science and machine learning both inside Microsoft and in the MVP community. What was less expected and more exciting was that there was also a lot of interest in F#, which is a perfect fit for both of these topics! When I visited Microsoft back in May to talk about Scalable Machine Learn[...]

There are huge amounts of data around us that we could use to better understand the world. Every company collects large amounts of data about their sales or customers. Governments and international organizations increasingly release interesting data sets to the public through various open government data initiatives (data.gov or data.gov.uk). But raw data does not tell you much. An interesting recent development is data journalism. Data journalists tell stories using data. A data driven article is based o[...]

There are huge amounts of data around us that we could use to better understand the world. Every company collects large amounts of data about their sales or customers. Governments and international organizations increasingly release interesting data sets to the public through various open government data initiatives (data.gov or data.gov.uk). But raw data does not tell you much. An interesting recent development is data journalism. Data journalists tell stories using data. A data driven article is base[...]

The core of many web sites and web APIs is very simple. Given an HTTP request, produce a HTTP response. In F#, we can represent this as a function with type Request -> Response. To make our server scalable, we should make the function asynchronous to avoid unnecessary blocking of threads. In F#, this can be captured as Request -> Async<Response>. Sounds pretty simple, right? So why are there so many evil frameworks that make simple web programming difficult? Fortunately, there is a nice F# library called [...]

The core of many web sites and web APIs is very simple. Given an HTTP request, produce a HTTP response. In F#, we can represent this as a function with type Request -> Response. To make our server scalable, we should make the function asynchronous to avoid unnecessary blocking of threads. In F#, this can be captured as Request -> Async<Response>. Sounds pretty simple, right? So why are there so many evil frameworks that make simple web programming difficult? Fortunately, there is a nice F# library cal[...]