On Tuesday I did a lightning talk at the MVP Summit in Bellevue on connecting to all things, from statistics to statistical programming languages with Intellisense and LINQ using F# Type Providers, a feature shipped with Visual Studio 2012:
Connecting to an Excel file:

Querying users stored on SQL Azure:
query {
for u in db.Users do
where (u.UserId <> userId)
select u
}
Querying genres via the Netflix API:
query {
for g in ctx.Genres do
where (g.Name = genre)
for t in g.Titles do
where (t.ReleaseYear ?<= 1959)
where (t.ReleaseYear ?>= 1934)
sortByNullable t.AverageRating
skip nToSkip
take nToTake
select t
}
Running B-Movie Sample on Azure: b-movies.azurewebsites.net
Connecting to the World Bank:
type WorldBank = WorldBankDataProvider<"World Development Indicators">
let data = WorldBank.GetDataContext()
let countries () =
[| data.Countries.India
data.Countries.``United Kingdom``
data.Countries.``United States`` |]
Rendering charts asynchronously using JavaScript High Charts using TypeScript definitions:
let render () = async {
let opts = h.HighchartsOptions()
opts.chart <- h.HighchartsChartOptions(renderTo = "chart", ``type`` = "line")
opts.title <- h.HighchartsTitleOptions(text = "School enrollment")
Running in the browser using FunScript (F# to JavaScript compiler):

Querying Hadoop Hive in the browser:
query {
for i in hive.iris do
groupBy i.``class`` into g
select (g.Key, Seq.length g)
}
