Earlier this week I gave a talk at the first London WebSharper User Group meetup about WebSharper 2.0 and some of its new features such as sitelets and the new Visual Studio templates. This was a longer, class-like talk with many technical points discussed - a great source of information for anyone interested in WebSharper. Here is the short summary of the talk:

Introducing WebSharper 2.0

WebSharper 2.0 is a web application development platform for F# that targets client-based rich internet applications. It integrates proven functional programming ideas and language- oriented programming to enable developing web applications that contain significantly less code and are quicker to develop and easier to maintain than their traditional counterparts. WebSharper comes with a proven F# to JavaScript compiler, full Visual Studio and ASP.NET integration, automatic resource management and tracking, single-click deployment, a continuously growing set of extensions for third-party JavaScript technologies (jQuery, YUI, Ext Js, Google Maps/Visualization, Infovis, etc.), and tools to develop new extensions and extend language/library coverage easily.

With WebSharper you can:

• Develop client-based Ajax web applications entirely in F#
• Write the client and server code side-by-side in a single language
• Compose user input forms, sequences of input forms, and even entire web sites declaratively as first-class values
• Use the full F# language, its core libraries and many .NET namespaces for client-side code
• Integrate seamlessly with existing ASP.NET applications
• Utilize any JavaScript technology via F# code
• Develop highly optimized JavaScript code in F#
• and much-much more

In this event you will learn about:

• Getting Started with WebSharper
• The functional programming foundation for its main features
• How to compose HTML with combinators
• How to define basic and more advanced user input forms declaratively
• How to enlist external JavaScript libraries into type-safe F# and WebSharper code
• How to provide further library coverage for.NET code
• How to turn F# applications to WebSharper web applications
• How to extend legacy web applications with client-based functionality
• Best practices of developing larger applications with WebSharper

Click on the picture below to view the video - it's about 2.5 hrs long, so grab some food and a beer before you sit down to watch it...