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.
<Sorry, the videos for “Functional Language Paradigms with F#” seem to no longer be available on vimeo>
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.