Ok, so I've started this hubFS thing. It has been a bit of work, but I had fun getting it moving. The best part now is that I've had a chance to have conversations with a number of people with F# interests from all over the planet. These are the people that I hope will eventually use their collective passions in F# to make The Hub a great place for F# work.

In the meantime, I've been bitten by the speaking bug and have been giving a few presentations recently. I recently spoke at the WI .NET User Group, Fox Valley .NET User Group and the Rockford .NET User Group. I'm hoping to speak at the Chippewa Valley .NET User Group in the coming months. As an aside, it would seem that every valley in Wisconsin has started a .NET User Group.

But the reason that I'm writing this post is because the prefix "F# Road Trips" will hopefully become a new series on this blog (I'm writing this both on The Hub and on my jjbresearch blogs). My goal is to go on the road approximately once every month or so and give F# presentations at various code camps and other venues. I'm currently working through a few different presentations, some of which are already complete:

1. F#: An Introduction Under an Application of Quantitative Finance
2. An Introduction to F#
3. F# and BizTalk 2006: Leveraging functional/imperative/OO programming in the rules engine
4. F# Functional Programming: Lambdas, closures and other constructs
5. Interactive Visualization with F#
6. F# and SQLCLR - Breaking domain encapsulation and placing business logic in SQLCLR with F#

Swarer (XPSD member and self-proclaimed "Ex-ubernerd, recently got himself a life.") and I talk regularly and he mentioned a few weeks ago that the Rock and Roll Code Camp (RRCC) was to take place in San Diego on June 24-25, 2006. I think his exact words were: "Dude. You gotta like, come out and like do this like code camp. It'll be uummmmm gnarly and stuff and like you can like tell everyone about that F# thing and whoa, we can like totally party and skip out of all of the other sessions especially those agile sessions on TDD and unit testing and stuff." (I cut and pasted that from an MSN IM session). I also know that after speaking with him, his tagline is not quite correct; he's still doesn't have a life, but he's borrowing someone else's for a little while.

I'm there. I'm speaking. I'm doing that F# thing. I'll be doing the #2, #3, #4 and #5 presentations.from the above list for RRCC. I'll submit for #6 to RRCC if I can complete my work on it in time to get on the schedule. If you are going to RRCC, DO NOT MISS #5 - Interactive Visualization with F#.

If you are having a code camp and want to hear about F#, give me a comment here or send me an email. I'm going to try to do one code camp per month or so, starting in August. Keep in mind, that the real reason for doing this is to find out where the best .NET parties take place.

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Note: I'm doing an impression of Godzilla and NOT evangelizing F# in this picture.