Microsoft Denmark have invited me to participate in JAOO 2008. If I in return spend some time in the Microsoft stand demoing F# and answering questions about F# and functional programming in general.

When Martin Esmann (Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist) approached me, I told him that I’d be happy to show up, but I’m not using F# from within Visual Studio. In fact, I’m usually not even using Microsoft’s .NET implementation. I’m a happy Mono user. To Martin’s credit his initial reaction was that it would be cool that I demoed F# using Linux and Mono in the Microsoft stand.

However, after talking it over with his colleges, Martin got back to me and told me that they thought that using Linux and Mono to demo F# would send to mixed a message. I agree with that. So unfortunately I won’t be demoing Mono in a Microsoft stand this time. But I’ll of course bring my own laptop, and might show F# on Mono and Linux if there are questions about portability. Maybe I should contact the Mono guys and ask for a T-shirt, so that I silently can invite questions about Mono 😉

Time to practice some F# demos.  Any suggestions for what would be effective? I’m planning to show of the brand new Units of Measure and also sequence comprehensions.