Passionate about programming, interested in meeting other like minded individuals? A good place to start is a local meetup group. .Net Here’s my short list of active .Net/Mono related groups in the UK which feature some C#, F# or VB content (let me know if I’ve missed your group): Group Members London Unity Usergroup 1074 Windows Phone User Group 850+ (on mailing list) F#unctional Londoners 742 [...]

Foq is a mature open source .Net mocking library written in F#. It’s raison d'être is to enable F# as a unit testing language, for F#, C# or VB.Net code bases. Foq is part a rich set of testing tools available to F# developers. Use Foq when unit testing in combination with staple .Net testing frameworks like NUnit and xUnit through to F# specific fluent assertion libraries like FsUnit and Unquote. Combine Foq with AutoFixture to simplify test setup even further. Wow, Autofixture.AutoFoq + AutoFixture.xU[...]

NorDevCon is a one day agile and tech conference held annually in the historic English town of Norwich, also the setting for the recent British comedy Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. Last Friday I took the short hop across the Fens to Norwich to talk about Data Science and Machine Learning with F#. First a talk on F# Type Providers entitled All your base types are belong to us (thanks to Ross McKinlay for the meme), and then after lunch a hands on Machine Learning workshop exploring `Titanic passengers using [...]

Are you a VB developer curious about functional-first programming. F# is a statically typed language built into Visual Studio. It is a multi-paradigm language with both functional and object-oriented constructs. F# has powerful type inference which reduces the amount of typing you need to do without reducing performance or correctness. F# projects are easily referenced from VB and vice versa. Like VB, F# makes minimal use of curly braces, and for many operations the syntax will feel quite familiar. H[...]

C# is a mainstream programming language based on Java, that runs on Windows via .Net and cross platform via Mono. On .Net , C# is used primarily in the enterprise for web and desktop applications. With Mono, C# can target a range of popular platforms including iOS and Andriod, and is primarily employed in mobile application development via Xamarin’s tools and game development via Unity. Microsoft’s current shipping C# compiler is proprietary code written in C++. Mono’s C# compiler, is open source and writ[...]