So GOTO has been kicked off, with a pretty good crowd for the walkthrough of todays speakers. As always the crowd is a bit slow at first until the first cop of coffee starts to work. It helped a bit when an Opera singer went on stage, forcing everybody to ask them selves of that was really happening of they had fallen back asleep.

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In the spirit of being well prepared and with GOTO just over a month away it is time to look a bit at this years program. Personally I will try and get around and also pick some talks on topics that are outside my normal area of interest. I know you probably already heard this, but it pretty much always ends up as the talks I get the most value from.

Monday

“JS beyond the browser”, “Architectures” and “Microsoft Devices and Services” are the three obvious tracks for me on the first day. However I will probably start out with Dan North’s talk on the track “When the Agile Manifesto isn't enough” about “Embracing uncertainty” . Dan is a really good speaker and last year he gave some of the very best talks IMHO.

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GOTO 2013 is slowly getting closer, and once again I am lucky enough to be blogging from the conference. Next week the bloggers will meet up to get some practical information as well as to collect ideas for which tracks to follow and what to blog about.

Last year I think went really well both with reguard to picking some interesting talks and that I was pleasently surprised that I got to interview Scott Hanselman and Anders Hejlsberg. So when it was decided to repeat the success and invite bloggers to the conference I definately wanted to go again.

After 4½ years at Vertica and 6½ years doing e-commerce I recently made the decision to look for new challanges. I am really happy with the years I have spent both with Hedal:Kruse:Brohus and Vertica doing e-commerce where I have learned a lot and had some great colleagues, but I really felt like making a change. Timing wise it made sense to do it now, because my girlfriend and I were looking to move to the other end of the country, where she got a job.

Looking around d60 caught my eye as a very interesting company, where things are evolving quickly and where I know they have a skilled group of developers - some of whom I already knew from the developer community. I sent them and email, and after a meeting there was no doubt that it was a good match, as a place where I can learn new skills as well as contribute new ideas.

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Azure is growing at an incredible pace and provides a good balance between lots of great services and easy ways to get started. I recently took a look at Azure mobile services, which seems to be an offering that has an interesting future with the rise of mobile development. So building a platform around features that you need to build these kinds of applications make all kinds of sense. Wanting to look more at Azure and with my recent focus on mobile it seems like a perfect fit for me.

Naming is hard

Diving into it you quickly become aware that the words "mobile services" are somewhat misleading, because although the service can be used for mobile it is just as much for building any other kind of small application. Only directly targeted mobile feature is push notifications. The featuers for working with data, scheduling and identity are very general purpose, but as a package this seems like a good idea - even though it name could be limiting to who will end up using it.

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While looking at how you can do your common scenarios in F# an obvious thing to look at is data access. I already covered type providers which are fantastic for consuming data. However type providers won't help you when you need to create data or in other ways interact with your SQL database, MongoDB, RavenDB or any other NoSQL solution you might be using. For this you will most likely want to use some of the libraries you already know and love - there is no reason to reinvent everything.

Working with existing libraries is mostly trivial, but F# likes types that are immutable which straight out of the box doesn't play well with serialization and mapping. This means that ORM's and libraries for MongoDB and RavenDB will throw exceptions when they try to construct your F# types. This basically boils down to the fact that code like the sample below won’t work, because the serializer can not instantiate the type and fill in the values.

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With my latest dive into F# I recently came across Canopy, which is a really nice and simple web testing framework. It really is as simple as installing a package and writing a few lines in a console application.

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I shortly wrote about Type Providers for SQL databases and services in a blog post last year, and since then a range of new providers have been written by the community. Just a quick search and you can find providers for WMI, CSV, XML, Regular expressions, REST services, world bank and pretty much every other thing you can imagine. Especially FSharpX and some of the excellent work done by people like Tomas Petricek.

After looking around I was surprised to see some of the use-cases. I was thinking in the lines of what LINQ provides until I saw samples like the provider for regular expressions.