Don Syme, Designer and co-implementer of the F# language

Don Syme is a Principal Researcher in the MSR Cambridge Programming Principles and Tools group. He joined MSR in 1998, and was the initiator, co-designer and co-implementer of Generics for .NET and C# 2.0. More recently he is the designer and co-implementer of the F# language and co-author of "Expert F#".

Presentation: "An Introduction to F#"

Track: Programming Languages

Time: Monday 13:30 - 14:30

Location: C103 Music Hall

Abstract:

F# is a succinct and expressive typed functional programming language for the .NET platform, and Microsoft will be supporting F# as a first class language in Visual Studio 2010. We'll take a look at what you need to know to start having fun with F#, and how to use it productively. We'll also look at some sample applications of F# and functional programming and cover aspects of parallel, reactive and asynchronous programming with F#.

Keywords: .NET, Functional Programming, Visual Studio, Concurrent Programming, Asynchronous Programming

Target Audience: Developers, architects and anyone interested in learning how to apply functional techniques in practice and have fun along the way

Presentation: "Concurrency Expert Panel"

Track: The Concurrency challenge

Time: Tuesday 13:30 - 14:30

Location: Archauz

Abstract:

One theme of the panel is concurrent programming models. Specifically; classic locking, transactional memory and actors. And with concurrency we mean parallel systems (e.g. shared-memory multicore, cluster)

The goal is performance
One trust domain
Latencies are small and predicable
One failure => kill the program is just about tolerable
One of the goals for the discussion would be to get a better understanding of strengths and weaknesses; advice and discussion about when to use which model.

Another goal is:

for the audience to get to pick the brains of the experts
to get a good discussion going amongst the experts
to get concrete advice on choice of programming language (hence model) for certain problems.
advice on solving common problems that appear when using a particular model.

Workshop: "Getting Started With F#"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Sunday 09:00 - 12:00

Location: 421+423 Music Hall

Abstract:

F# is a succinct and expressive typed functional programming language for the .NET platform, and Microsoft will be supporting F# as a first class language in Visual Studio 2010. In this tutorial you'll get a taste or F# programming from the basics through to some parallel and asynchronous programming with F#. You'll learn how to get started with the functional, imperative and object-oriented programming in F#, how to use shaped functional data to reduce the amount of state in your application, and how to use units of measure to bring sanity and checking to your numerical code. You'll also get a taste for some parallel and asynchronous programming, and take a look at some more advanced techniques in reflection.

Keywords: .NET, Functional Programming, Visual Studio, Concurrent Programming, Asynchronous Programming

Target Audience: Developers, architects and anyone interested in learning how to apply functional techniques in practice and have fun along the way