Those of us in the Visual F# team are pleased to announce that the Washington DC F# Meetup group has now been launched!   Welcome! This is an F# meetup group that meets in and around the DC area. The goal is to bring likeminded local F# enthusiasts together to learn, play, and explore the F# language and ecosystem. Programmers of all skill levels and backgrounds are welcome. Tweet at us at @DCFsharp! The group already has 58 members, and of course is very welcoming to all. The group meets tonight for [...]

Earlier this week, the Release Candidate build of Visual Studio 2013 was announced.  Like the Preview build before it, the RC contains a host of new features for F# developers, including F# 3.1 language updates and improved Visual F# tooling.  You can read the details in our earlier blog post. The RC contains one brand-new F# feature, though, which we are pleased to announce today: Send to F# Interactive. The same solution explorer context menus used to manage assembly references in F# projects now give [...]

The Progressive F# Tutorials are returning to New York City on September 18-19th! The Progressive F# Tutorials bring together the leading experts in F# to deliver a range of talks, 4 hour intensive hands-on tutorials and discussions, allowing attendees to truly deep dive and develop hands-on experience. With the help of Rick Minerich SkillsMatter have put together a super exciting programme, featuring both an advanced track and a track for beginners. Alongside Don Syme, the designer of F#, the conference f[...]

The topic of integrating F# and Microsoft Excel arises frequently, particularly in financial, insurance, statistical and data science work. There are several approaches to this, and in a recent discussion about F# in Finance, the topic of Excel DNA came up.  To quote: Excel-DNA is an independent project to integrate .NET into Excel. With Excel-DNA you can make native (.xll) add-ins for Excel using C#, Visual Basic.NET or F#, providing high-performance user-defined functions (UDFs), custom ribbon interfaces[...]

Join the F# Seattle User Group meetup next Wednesday for a talk about functional-style control flow in F#: Many developers come to F# from the imperative world of C#, where they are accustomed to various loop types, if/else blocks, switches, breaks, and other imperative control flow mechanisms.  Some of these concepts are simply not present in F#, and those that are often translate into awkward, verbose F# code. In this meetup we will discuss a better approach: Using idiomatic, functional-style con[...]