  We develop a meanfield treatment of a polarized trapped Fermi gas with
dipole-dipole interactions. Our approach is based on self-consistent
semiclassical Hartree-Fock theory that accounts for direct and exchange
interactions. We discuss our procedure for numerically implementing the
calculation. We study the thermodynamic and the first and second order
correlation properties of the system. We find that the system entropy depends
on the trap geometry, allowing the system to be cooled as the trap aspect ratio
is increased, and that exchange interactions cause the correlation functions to
be anisotropic in the low temperature regime. We also find that many uniform
gas thermodynamic predictions, for which direct interaction effects vanish, are
qualitatively unreliable for trapped systems, most notably for oblate traps. We
develop a simplified Hartree formalism that is applicable to anisotropic
harmonic traps.
