Over the past several month I’ve been prototyping various aspects of  an IoT platform – or more specifically, exploring the concerns …Continue reading →

In Code First Entity Framework models, you can define the length of a string field with StringLengthAttribute, but you have to write code in OnModelCreating to indicate a CHAR/NCHAR fixed length field: public class MyEntity { [Key] public int Id { get; set; } [StringLength(2)] public string FixedLengthColumn { get; set; } } public partial class MyContext : DbContext { public virtual DbSet MyEntities { [...]

In part one of this series we walked through modeling the domain of our card game. In this post we'll use that domain as a guide to help us create a deck, shuffle the deck, and deal cards from the deck. Creating the deck There may be more elegant ways to do this, but for now we'll simply define a value and populate it with the cards. let newDeck = [(Two, Spades); (Three, Spades); (Four, Spades); (Five, Spades); (Six, Spades); (Seven, Spades); (Eight, Spades); (Nine, Spades); (Ten, Spa[...]

A couple of weeks ago, I came across this blog post by Steve Shogren, which looks at various programming languages, and attempts to define a “language safety score”, by taking into account a list of language criteria (Are nulls allowed? Can variables be mutated? And so on), aggregating them into an overall safety score – and finally looking for whether the resulting score was a reasonable predictor for the observed bug rate across various projects. I thought this was an interesting idea. However, I also h[...]

I know what's like in the summertime, a bit quiet, so I thought it would be fun to build a Robot Arm, and to control it from a Raspberry Pi using self written F# software. Project goals are: have fun, learn some, and if possible, do a "Sean's dad" trick: inspire a kid.The ingredients are: One Raspberry Pi 2B (quad core!) plus accessories (power, network cable, HDMI cable), a clean Micro SD card (cat 10) with adaptor, a USB keyboard, a MeArm robot arm, four Servo motor cord extensions (3x10cm 1x2 [...]