F# and Windows Azure

If you’re an F# enthusiast like we are, then you’ll be excited to find out that Microsoft just released some F# samples that work closely with Windows Azure. Also, they provide some Visual Studio F# templates for the new platform.

First sample is a version of the Thumbnails sample that is part of the Windows Azure SDK samples. Combines a C# Web role and an F# Worker role. The Worker role accepts queued requests to create thumbnails for image files, and places the results into the blob store.

The second sample is a web crawler that follows links in web pages downloading the pages as it goes into a blob storage. New urls to process are pulled from a queue, the page for the url is downloaded and saved to the blob store, and the links from the page are extracted and placed back into the queue. This causes the queue to continue to grow as new pages are visited. The project is configured to run four worker processes, providing simple and implicit parallelism.

Check it out on MSDN website.

F# is a type-safe, scalable language for the .NET platform that supports both functional and object-oriented programming. You can find here the F# compiler and tools, as well as Visual Studio 2008 integration for F# development.

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