Are you tired of generating strongly typed classes with millions of lines of C# using crmsvcutil.exe that often crashes?  Fed up with having to re-generate the classes every time something in the schema changes?  Feeling restricted by the LINQ provider's limitations?  Ever wonder why you should need to know what attribute joins to what in your relationships to perform your joins? F# to the rescue! I am working on a F# type provider than aims to solve a lot of these pains, and more besides!  This is just a [...]

This is the continuation of my series converting the samples found in Machine Learning in Action from Python to F#. After starting on a nice and steady pace, I hit a speed bump with Chapter 6, dedicated to the Support Vector Machine algorithm. The math is more involved than the previous algorithms, and the original Python implementation is very procedural , which both slowed down the conversion to a more functional style. Anyways, I am now at a good point to share progress. The current version uses Sequent[...]

I have been obsessing about the following idea lately – what if I could run a FSI session from within Excel? The motivation behind this is double. First, one thing Excel is good at is creating and formatting charts. If I could use F# for data manipulation, and Excel for data visualization, I would be a happy camper. Then, I think F# via FSI could provide an interesting alternative for Excel automation. I’d much rather leverage existing .NET libraries to, say, grab data from the internet, than write some VB[...]

I currently do a lot of Office type automation work where I scan a bunch of email from exchange, download excel attachments, open and transform a bunch of data from them, reconcile these against databases using FLinq, produce graphs and charts with the results using FSharpChart, and so forth. (p.s - as a side note, F# is awesome at doing this kind of thing, I can knock all kinds of stuff out super fast.  p.p.s - Active patterns with Excel = win) As anyone who has done any office automation will know, clean[...]

I recently completed the Coursera Social Network Analysis class. This was my first time taking a Coursera class. In this post, I will describe my experience with Coursera generally, and review the Social Network Analysis class in particular. Along with several of my Spruce Media colleagues, I took Martin Odersky’s Functional Programming Principles in Scala class [...]