CLR and Language Expert Joel Pobar

Joel Pobar is a compiler and languages geek who recently relocated to the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. He was previously a Program Manager on the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) team where he worked on late-bound dynamic CLR features and API's, the Shared Source CLI (Rotor) program, Generics and Dynamic languages. He is active in the .NET community, spending his spare time writing blog entries, articles for his favourite publication (MSDN magazine), and regularly speaks at Microsoft technology conferences.

Check out his blog here

Presentation: "Smart Software with F#"

Time: Tuesday 16:15 - 17:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract: Google, Netflix, Amazon and more, are using smart algorithms that leverage ever increasing clock cycles, and a plethora of user generated data, to find patterns that derive value. They've brought smart software to the attention of the software development mainstream: PageRank, machine learning, support vector machines, classification techniques, search and rank, and more. We explore some of these algorithms and their implementations using a new functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET platform, called F#. It has features and techniques that make working with data and building smarts much easier. We'll start with a walk through of the language, then get right down to hacking out smart algorithms that you can leverage in your own software.

Workshop: "Introduction to Functional Programming"

Time: Wednesday 13:00 - 16:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract:

With the release of Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft will introduce a new programming language, Visual F#, to the mainstream .NET development community for the first time in close to a decade. Visual F# represents a new style of programming, a functional approach to programming, historically characterized by "academic" languages like Haskell and ML. In this tutorial, we'll examine the 'why and how' of F#, including the benefits and drawbacks of a functional programming style, and how it can be combined with object-oriented programming to take best advantage of both approaches. Along the way, we will write some F# code, giving the attendee a strong basis of F# syntax that they can use to learn more about F# back home.

By the end of the tutorial, in fact, attendees who bring their own laptops (with F# CTP installed) and attack the exercises provided will have enough skill at F# to begin writing F# code that can be called from C# in a variety of different contexts.