Wizards of Smart

I presented this at Houston Tech Fest 2009 back in September. The attendees received the topic well, and I was pretty happy with it, considering I’m still learning a lot myself.

I presented this at Houston Tech Fest 2009 back in September.

For those interested in learning the principles of functional programming, Dr. Erik Meijer and Channel 9 started releasing a lecture series using Haskell as the primary language and exercises in C#. They provide a discount for Graham Hutton‘s Programming in Haskell, the text for the series, as well. Go check it out here!

I’m quite interested in Matthew Podwysocki’s application of F# (and functional programming) to collective intelligence. Have any of you worked in the collective intelligence space? If so, with what languages, and what was your experience?

David Morton just posted a set of extremely helpful keyboard shortcuts. Check them out. I recently discovered a few of those myself recently, and I agree that my productivity has certainly increased.

If you are a vi fan, you might also have a go with ViEmu. I didn’t feel it was worth the $100, but if you like vi, you might want to go for it.

For those of you not already enjoying Twine, may I recommend the following twines to whet your appetite:

• Domain Driven Design
• Model Driven Development
• Domain Specific Languages
• M
• Web Developer
• Microsoft Developer
• GreekFire
• F#
• Zoomable User Interfaces
• Silverlight
• Cloud Computing

If you want something slightly less technical, you can try one of these:

• Future of Learning
• *Changing America
• Financial and Economic Global Crisis
• Teaching the Heroic Journey
• Beer

Andrew Connell just posted a link to new Microsoft site for tutorials, white papers and labs regarding SharePoint development in .NET. Development areas specifically called out include Custom Content, Page navigation and branding, Silverlight, Web Parts, Web Services, Workflow and others.

Andrew also linked to a webcast series on SharePoint development and the corresponding labs. Of course, all those are available at the new site, but the links may be handy for those of you who don’t want to go looking.

For those interested, I found this article and related tutorial from Eric White to be quite fascinating. I went through the tutorial this weekend and thought some of you might also be interested. Eric gives reasons for using functional programming (fp) over conventional object-oriented programming (oop); his most common reason is for performing transformations of data from one sort to another. Other highlights are more in-depth looks at extension methods, Linq and Office Open XML. (While you might wonder why you’d use fp instead of XSLT, the concepts can also apply to transforming objects/collections to other objects/collections using lazy evaluation and deferred execution).