Real-World F# Articles on MSDN

More than a year ago, Mike Stephens from Manning (who was also behind my Real-World Functional Programming book) asked me if I'd be interested in collaborating on a project for MSDN. The idea was to collaborate with Microsoft on creating some additional content for the official F# Documentation.

A few days ago, the new content appeared on MSDN, so I finally have an excuse for the recent lack of blogging! Although the content contains a large number of new articles that are not based on my book, you can find it in the MSDN section named after my book, right under Visual F#. If you can't wait to check it out, here are all the links:

While working on the articles, I also wrote about a few topics that we didn't use in the final version. You'll see them on my blog in the next few days, as soon as I edit them into a blog post form.

Acknowledgements

At the moment, the information about authors on MSDN is a bit confusing, so let me clarify:

The Chapter I. Introducing Functional Programming is based on the Real-World Functional Programming book, which I wrote together with Jon Skeet.

The Chapter IV. Numerical and Symbolic Computing was written mainly by Yin Zhu, who is well known in the F# community thanks to his F# and Data Mining blog.

The remaining four chapters are new material written by me. They are partly based on my recent talks on reactive programming, concurrent programming with agents and accessing data.

There are quite a few people who significantly helped with the project in one way or another. Nermina Miler and Mike Stephens from Manning helped to manage everything. Don Syme and Gordon Hogenson (from the F# documentation team) helped by reviewing several versions of the TOC. Keith Battocchi and Gordon also carefuly reviewed all the articles. Thanks!

Chapter overview

In the rest of the article, I'll give a brief overview of each chapter, so that you know what new exciting topics are now covered as part of the F# Documentation on MSDN.