Use F# Programming to Win the RockPaperAzure Challenge!

The RockPaperAzure Challenge is a competition being run by the Microsoft Azure team. You can find all the details in www.rockpaperazure.com

Did you play Rock, Paper, Scissors as a kid? Does it still determine who makes the afternoon coffee run? Then you already know how to play the game. Now's your chance to code your own player "bot" and test your skills online. Will your bot have what it takes to crush the competition? Join the weekly tournaments and battle it out with other developers to win weekly prizes (not to mention serious bragging rights). Here's how:

I'm very pleased to announce that you can now use F# programming to enter this competition! A huge thank you to Jim O'Neil, Brian Hitney and Peter Laudati of the RockPaperAzure team for enabling this, and to Joel Mueller for reporting the issue that was preventing F# usage. The details of how to get going are over on Jim's blog, including a simple F# bot. Here are some snippets:

We’re just beginning the third week of the RockPaperAzure Challenge , and Brian , Peter , and I are continually thinking of new features and capabilities to add. Just last week Brian opened up the game engine to support multiple different rounds, so people who are unfortunately not eligible to enter the competition (due to residency and age requirements or by having won prizes in previous weeks’ competitions) can still play along for bragging rights.

The newest drop of the Bot Lab code now includes projects for building your bot in VB.NET and F# (in addition to C#), along with sample code for the ‘house bots’: Random, Cycle, and BigBang. While it certainly wasn’t rocket surgery to get these new implementations working, there were a couple of things I discovered in the process that I thought would be worth mentioning...

If you love the idea of F# cloud programming, I encourage you to enter this competition, it looks like a lot of fun.

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