Conferences

Conferences / Events / User Groups — 3 Comments
21
Sep 10

Learning F# for Fabulous Prizes

Nearly a month ago I visited the NYC ALT.NET User Group in Manhattan.  Having been told by Steve Bohlen that I was up against a particularly sharp audience, I decided to do something much different than I had in any of my previous talks. Spread throughout my slides were questions. Those who answered correctly first were given F# stickers that they were later able to turn into various prizes.

I found that the anticipation caused by not knowing when the next question might be asked kept attendees on their toes. Energy ran high throughout the session, higher than I’ve ever seen before. That said, never before have I had the pleasure of having such an intelligent and attentive audience.

Along these lines, I’m planning on running a contest at my upcoming CUFP F# tutorial. Grand prize will be a MSDN Subscription with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. I know many in the audience will be running Linux or OSX, but it’s just about the best thing I have on hand to give away and I’m fairly certain that it comes along with Windows 7 so you can run it in a VM.

Many thanks to Alex Hung who has provided high quality video of my NYC ALT.NET talk.

Note: On the Async question: I suggest using function composition and sequences for discrete element transforms. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to mention it.

Note: For the DSL question: You do get intellisense within a module. For your DSL you can just put your grammar into a module and then blamo, intellisense.
Errata: I was wrong about the compiler sources. It turns out the compiler source is available in the CTP. Vladimir Matveev has written a great post on how to build it.

Conferences / Events — 2 Comments
3
Aug 10

In Retrospect: TechEd 2010 North America

Celebrity photo op with Sara Ford

This year I was invited by Microsoft to attend TechEd 2010 North America in New Orleans.  Largely, I was to be found at the Visual Studio languages booth answering questions about F#.  It was exhilarating to hear so many developers come up and talk about how they were planning to use F# to tackle what they previously thought insurmountable.  Most often I heard engineers tell me about how they wanted to paralellize complex computations but didn’t want to sacrifice the readability of their models.  Although, a great many were also excited just to dig into some new language features and to try and understand programming in a new way.

One of the most exciting things about the trip was that Amanda Laucher and Ed Hickey helped me to put together an on-site meeting for the New England F# User Group.   Steffen Forkmann spoke on his F# projects from Germany to two audiences: one at our usual location in at the Microsoft Nerd Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and another at TechEd NA 2010 in New Orleans.  Thanks to Talbott, who was facilitating the Cambridge meeting along with Michael, a video of the talk is now available online.

I spent my off time hunting down smart people and forcing them to hang out.  Thankfully, most didn’t seem to mind.  The Visual Studio languages guys were friendly as always.  Of the few I didn’t meet at the MVP summit, it was most fantastic to finally meet Amanda Laucher in person.  When she’s around things just seem to magically come together.  I also had some awesome times with Alan Stevens, a man even more rad in person than in the stories they tell about him.

That Friday I hopped on a plane euphoric and exhausted, and headed to Singularity Summit 2010 for a slightly more intellectual, but much more subdued time.

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