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F# Talk at Edge UG: Slides and Demos

The Edge UG, based in London, is the “Uber Usergroup for all developers and IT Pros working on the Microsoft technology stacks.” This statement doesn’t seem too wide of the mark either; when put to a show of hands most attendees responded yes to experience of both C++ and C#, with plenty also playing with WPF and Silverlight!

I presented a 1 hour talk introducing F# with 4 demos (attached to this post):

  • Full-screen WPF POS Checkout sample with Barcode scanner integration (in 100 lines)
  • Twitter WPF client script (200 lines)
  • Matermind board game in WPF (300 lines)
  • Lunar Lander XNA game (>400 lines)

Expect a video of the talk should be on the Edge UG site soon.

Some tweet feedback from the event:

ebrucucen:F# session started with @ptrelford at #edgeuk

johanbarnard: Watching really interesting F# presentation by @ptrelford at #EdgeUG.

ptrelford:Talking about F# again in front of a lot of people

ColinMackay: F# is more fun than I expected. Demos use XNA to create games in F#. #edgeug

raybooysen: Lunar lander in XNA and F#! #edgeug

johnno31: @ptrelford when can we have pizza??

My tweet was delivered from the F# Twiiter client script during the talk!

F_ Introduction_EdgeUG.ppsx (660.16 kb)

FSharpDemos.zip (53.40 kb)

P.S. To see more F# related talks please join the new F# London User Group

Comments (2) -

  • Ebru

    2/18/2010 4:01:55 PM |

    Thanks for the talk Phil!
    Will be looking for your next talk...
    Can I ask you to put the presentation in pdf format?
    Ta,

  • David Glaubman

    2/19/2010 12:47:40 PM |

    Thanks for posting your slides and demos, Phil.

    Your Mastermind implementation has served me well as skeleton for several Q&C (quick and clean) apps.

    One note on the F# books slide:  As a longtime OO programmer (C++ -> Java-> C#) I found the F# learning curve pretty steep.  

    The two books I found that really helped me most getting a handle on functional programming concepts were two entry-level undergraduate texts from the 90's: "Elements of ML Programming", by Ullman (1998), and "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2nd Ed" (Abelson and Sussman, 1996).

    The former provides gentle but clear intro to F#'s OCAML line of descent.  The latter is, simply, the best book on computer programming I have ever read.

    By contrast, I bought "ML for the Working Programmer" a couple of months ago, and was disappointed (in its applicability to helping me gain deeper understanding in fun programming and F#).

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