Tomas will talk about his most recent favourite F# programming area – reactive programming. This includes programming applications driven by events such as user interactions, messages received from other components or completion of asynchronous operations. Writing reactive applications has been difficult, because the application cannot control what is happening. Fortunately, F# provides some very nice techniques that we can use to deal with these problems.

During this talk, Tomas will cover two techniques. We’ll start by looking at F# events and declarative approach for specifying event processing. Next, we’ll look at embedding F# event handling into asynchronous workflows and programming using “state machines”. We’ll also briefly mention how this relates to more general functional programming “design patterns”.

More about Tomas Petricek

Tomas is a long time F# enthusiast, using F# since the early Microsoft Research versions. He has been a Microsoft C# MVP since 2004, and together with Jon Skeet wrote Real-world Functional Programming which explains basic functional concepts using C# 3.0 (teaching F# alongside) and which shows several appealing real-world uses of F# and functional techniques. He also contributed to the development of F# during two internships at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.