Don Syme
Don Syme is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, and the lead architect on the F# programming language. He specializes in making aspects of computer science research work "for real" in more industrial settings, particularly with regard to programming techniques, and doing the research and development needed to make that happen. He co-designed and implemented generics for .NET in 2001-2004, and before this was a PhD at the University of Cambridge, and before that grew up in a little country town in Australia with an Apple IIe.
Track abstract - .NET
F# for Parallel and Asynchronous Computing
Concurrency is increasingly important for many applications, and the shift to manycore brings abundant parallelism to the desktop. The web, Silverlight and distributed systems increase the demand for asynchronous solutions. F# is a succinct and expressive typed functional programming language for the .NET platform that makes major contributions to productivity in parallel and asynchronous programming, making these both fun and easy. This talk will quickly review the core concepts of the F# language, and show how ideas like immutability, functional design, async workflows and agents can be used to meet the challenges of today’s real world applications. Microsoft will be supporting F# as a first class language in Visual Studio 2010 and we'll take a look at what you need to know to start being productive with F#.
