Session: Languages

Abstract: Functional programming is a hot topic: there is a growing awareness of the importance of functional techniques in the developer community, and imperative programming has limitations in a networked and concurrent multi-core world. This session will introduce Microsoft's new language F#, a typed functional programming language for the .NET Framework that combines the succinctness, expressivity, and compositionality of functional programming with the runtime support, libraries, interoperability, tools, and object model of.NET. This session will introduce you to the basics of F#. We'll take a look at why Microsoft is adding the language to the suite of those available on .NET, and at some of simple language constructs that make programming in F# a dream. We'll also take a look at how F# asynchronous workflows help you tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming and how to use F# in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET.