You decide what happens in the developer community. You can vote with your feet by choosing which conferences and user group meetings you can turn up at. You can also vote with your mouse and decide which talks you’d like to hear all the way through to the new features you’d like to see in developer products.
If you’re a .Net developer there are a lot of ways you can get involved with the community by voting with your feet and choosing which user group meetings you attend. These days you can vote for the talks you’d like to see at a conference through to new features for your IDE in the new version of Visual Studio,
Developer Developer Developer 10 (DDD10)
The DDD10 conference will be held at the Microsoft Campus in Reading (UK) on Saturday September 1st, you can vote for the talks you’d like to see (voting closes next week).
Here’s a few of my picks:
Note: this conference is free however you need to be quick when registration opens, the places are usually all taken in the first hour.
F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group
Like most user groups the the F#unctional Londoners let you suggest what meetings you’d like to see next, just let us know. The next meetup is a Coding Kata on Thursday 26th July at Skills Matter, hope to see you there!
User Voice
Over 1,000 votes have been cast for Full Support for F within MonoDevelop.
MonoDevelop is a .Net development environment that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. The F# add-in for MonoDevelop (thanks Tomas Petricek) bring full support for F# with colour coding, intelllisense and tooltips.
Visual Studio
Again using User Voice, you can suggest and vote for features in Visual Studio
Here’s my suggestion for C# (the idea is taken from Java’s import keyword):
Support using for static classes, e.g. using static System.Math;
Allow the static keyword to be applied in a using namespace directive, e.g. using static System.Math; allowing static classes to be treated as namespaces and avoid having to fully qualify every method call, i.e. Math.Max becomes just Max
The most voted for suggestion for F# is Provide refactoring support for F# code.
Everyone gets 10 votes, why not have your say.
Resharper
For many .Net developers Resharper is the first add-in they install for Visual Studio (for me it’s VisualHG). ReSharper 7 promises an SDK that enables developing support for new languages.
Again you can vote: ReSharper support for F#
Thanks to everyone who has voted for this issue, we’re up to 59 votes now!
There are already a few Visual Studio add-ins for F# that support code indentation and refactoring:
Here’s some more excellent suggestions for refactoring support in F# (via Twitter):
Phillip Trelford @ptrelford
@brandewinder compiling a list of key features for an F# R# plugin probably makes sense now. Rename, code navigation & test runner?
Mathias Brandewinder @brandewinder
.@ptrelford good list. Nonstandard R#, but I think an indentation guideline would be nice, too (exists separately already)
Mathias Brandewinder @brandewinder
.@7sharp9 good one on that list: remove/highlight dead code. cc@ptrelford @1tgr
Ben Taylor @bentayloruk
@ptrelford I like that list too. Rename is far and away the main one for me. Optimise "open"s & "add open" would be nice (like ns in C#).
Tim Robinson @1tgr
@ptrelford @brandewinder convert closure to object
Tim Robinson @1tgr
@ptrelford @brandewinder function call to pipeline, and vice versa
Tim Robinson @1tgr
@ptrelford @brandewinder curry/uncurry
Dave Thomas @7sharp9
@1tgr @ptrelford @brandewinder Maybe 'borrow' some of these:http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/catalogue/
Make a difference
Get involved and have your say about what happens in your future, your opinions matter.