F# and Azure in Practice

The event is in Finnish only, but these pages are a translation of the materials used. So this is just a quick translation, not a perfect F#-tutorial. Original Finnish version.

There are actually 2 levels of exercises and they are not in any particular order.

Initial Exercises

It is better to start here, if you are not familiar with the topic.

Creating an Azure Worker
- Here we create an Azure Worker role, which is used as a template in other exercises.
F# in Brief
- Some basics of F#-language syntax.

Advanced Exercises

These are very short introductions to larger-scale topics.

Information Rich Programming Language
- It is easy to use any data source in F# and start to develop using it. The compiler compiles the data model as part of the language and IDE.
Azure Blob- and Table Storage
- Using Azure storages from the F#-language.
Actor-model and Agent-model
- Model to implement the program state so that it is distributed: no locks but message passing. You can't stop the program and check "what state it is in"; the state is constantly changing and will look different from the different point of views.
Domain-modelling, DSL-language
- DSL-language: the king of the workflow/process/rule -engines and frameworks.
- Selecting the primitives, composition and syntax
OWIN-interface and SignalR-messaging
- OWIN is a middleware-interface to the server, in which you may register components like www-hosting-service.
- SignalR will take care of two-way communication channel between the server and the client.

Independent Exercises

Some well-known existing references of F# usage areas are:

Stock/Commodities Trading
Social Gaming
Cloud Computing

But F# is a general purpose language, so you can code what you want. :-)

These exercises start from the scratch. Still, if you have network problems or something, you may download an example-VS2013-solution from here.

Special thanks to tomasp and dmohl about their tools used in this tutorial. :-)