About one year ago, I just finished looking at what was new in the world of mouses. I wondered whether there could be something new in the world of Keyboards.​Only one product appeared very different, which was the Beeraider Keyboard. But the product did not exist yet, it was crowdfunded via a pre-order process. The design was singing in my mind though, so I pre-ordered in September 2015, accepting all the risks this step could involve.Once per month I received a status update email from & [...]

I was asked to give a presentation at work about Akka.Net. Even though my audience is 100% C# loving, I will give a demonstration with F# code. I was already working on a project to rewrite “Three is a Crowd” to the Actor model in F#, and this presentation was a driver to finish this project. Let’s share my experiences with Akka.Net here.Choices and MotivationThere were two goals of rewriting the game to Akka.Net. First of all, I wanted to try out a few design patterns. Secondly, if you ru [...]

It was one of those wow-moments when I learned that Fsharp is suitable for making a DSL, that actually appears readable. It looks better than one of those fluent interfaces with method chaining. I was really interested in making a DSL, just as a learning exercise, and perhaps to contribute a dime to the Fsharp community. I stayed close to home, I already was in a System Integration project for my paid job, where we used Apache Camel. I was quite content with its elegance and simplicity.Howe [...]

One of those things that I keep searching on the internet, for examples and Howto’s is, how do you hide stuff in Fsharp?Hiding stuff can be very useful. When you create a library, or a DSL, or perhaps a framework, you want to provide a good user-experience by hiding implementation details.  At the same time, you don’t want your code to add a magnitude of complexity, to fulfil this requirement. Fsharp is perfect for that, and the following may help.Note that I will only handle cases whic [...]

Writing something in C# and then rewriting it in F#, almost nobody does that. I did.I used to write games in Silverlight. I didn't have any revenu, but I discovered that such projects are fun to do, and that you can pickup a lot of experience with all sorts of techniques, in a short time. Experience that your real day job may not provide. At some moment I quit Silverlight games. But I still appreciated the experience you can get from such projects.To learn HTML5, I started a new game i [...]