When you want to set a date literal in F# (or C#) you create a new DateTime instance: let today = DateTime(2014,26,4) If you’re rocking VB.Net you get date literals which are checked at design & compile time: Dim d = #2014/04/26# I thought it’d be nice to add design and compile time checked date literals to F#, & throw in code completion for good measure. Enter F# Type Providers. No need to open millions of lines of compiler code, instead simply implement a class to provide the types & voilà: let[...]

Following up on the last Roslyn preview way back in 2012, this week saw the availability of a new preview with a more complete compiler along with a few new language features for C# and VB. A lot of inspiration for these features seems to have come from the F# language. The C# interactive shell from 2012 appears to be missing, perhaps ScriptCS is expected to fill this space, or you could just use F# interactive which already exists in Visual Studio. On the language features side, C# 6 gets primary const[...]

Microsoft’s Build 2014 conference is currently in full flow, one of the new products announced is Orleans, an Actor framework for Azure. There’s an MSDN blog article with some details, apparently it was used on Halo 4. Demis Bellot of ServiceStack fame, tweeted his reaction: .NET's actor model uses static factories, RPC Interfaces and code-gen client proxies for comms, WCF all over again: http://t.co/PyIq291Kvh — Demis Bellot (@demisbellot) April 3, 2014 I retweeted, as it wasn’t far off my initial[...]

A Programming Language (APL) was invented in the swinging 60s, first appearing in 1964. C#, an OOP language, first appeared in the year 2000, to coincide with Britney’s Oops!… I did it again world tour. Adding numbers APL C# 2 + 2 using System; class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(2 + 2); } }   Note: C# may get a REPL in Visual Studio when project Roslyn is finally released. Min/M[...]

Type Providers are a mature language feature of F# 3 that provide instant typed access, with code completion, to a wide variety of data sources, without requiring code generation. As a language feature, F# Type Providers are cross platform, meaning they can be accessed on Windows via .Net, or on Mac and Linux using the Mono runtime. If you’re interested in using Type Providers pop down to Skills Matter this Thursday for a Type Provider Treasure Hunt with Tomas Petricek, or Creating Type Providers Hands On[...]