A bit more C#/.NET generics research project history. Attached is the "Ext-VOS" white paper from back in 1999. We passed this around to many Project-7 members at the time. Way back in the dark, dark days of object-oriented fundamentalism (i.e. the 1990s), for the big, typed languages like Java there were no function values, no delegates, no closures. There were no generic types, no tuple types, no Task<T>, no IEnumerable<T>, no IQueryable<T>, no List<T>, no Dictionary<Key,Value>. There was no LINQ, and cou[...]

Ein neues  F# Buch, auf Deutsch http://entwickler-press.de/ep/psecom,id,2,buchid,239.html Mit Visual Studio 2010 hielt eine neue Programmiersprache in der .NET-Welt Einzug: F#. Das Stadium der Forschungssprache hat F# hinter sich gelassen und stellt Ihnen mit seinem hybriden Ansatz Möglichkeiten zur Verfügung, die weit über das Können anderer .NET-Sprachen hinausgehen. Die objektorientierte Welt ist sogar besser als in C# unterstützt und die funktionale Programmierung eröffnet in vielen Bereichen neue und[...]

Another history email, discovered while poking around for some old image files. There are some other entries in this series here. In any case, In 2004 I sent around a note to our research lab about our coding work on .NET generics. It began: I am enormously relieved to announce that the Cambridge Generics team (Andrew, Claudio and myself) have essentially finished all of our coding work and bug fixing for the Whidbey Beta 1 release of the Common Language Runtime (which is included in the .NET Framework, Vi[...]

There is a very nice online book called "The F# Survival Guide", previously hosted at ctocorner.com. Unfortunately, for some reason that site is no longer available. Several F# community members have tried to work out why, but so far to no avail. In any case, the book is HTML and the most recent version is available at the internet archive web.archive.org.  So if you're looking to read it, here is a link to an archived edition of The F# Survival Guide.  Don

Regular readers of my blog will know that from time to time I post some historical notes related to the research projects I've been involved in at Microsoft Research. Recently, I was asked some historical questions about our work on .NET Generics in 2001. To help frame an answer, I thought I'd post one of our research project outputs from 2001 as part of the .NET Generics project.  The attached document is the "GC#" (Generic C#)  language design specification from December 2001, written by the Microsoft Re[...]