.NET Rocks interview about F#

The guys at the twice-weekly audio show .NET Rocks just interviewed Jon Harrop about the F# programming language.

Exploiting Tail Recursion

The F#.NET Journal just published an article describing essential concepts in the design of functional loops:

"Recursion is essential to functional programming and the ability to write recursive functions that do not consume stack space can be pivotal. Function calls that require no stack space are called tail calls. This article describes the use of tail calls to write robust and efficient tail recursive functions in F#..."

To read this article and more, subscribe to The F#.NET Journal today!

Foundations of F# podcast

Robert Pickering, the author of "Foundations of F#", recently did an audio interview with Scott Hansel of HanselMinutes. The 25Mb audio file of the interview is available for download here.

Introduction to DirectX

The F#.NET Journal just published an article describing basic use of DirectX in Windows Forms from the F# programming language:

The .NET platform contains library interfaces to almost all of the functionality bundled with the Windows platform. Hardware-accelerated graphics are no exception and Managed DirectX (MDX) for .NET provides a high-level and type-safe interface to the DirectX API...

To read this article and more, subscribe to The F#.NET Journal today!

F# 1.9.2 released

The F# team at Microsoft Research just released a new version of F#. This version adds several new features including:

• use bindings: automatically dispose objects.
• Slicing: refer to strided subarrays with a concise syntax.
• Labelled and optional arguments: give function arguments names and default values.
• Monadic-style asynchronous programming: a beautiful functional style for concurrent programs.
• Visualization API: allows F# programs to use a uniform API to generate graphics using third-party products like Excel for F# for Visualization.

All of these features will be described in detail in future F#.NET Journal articles.