Working on the command line with Powershell, much of the time I have the luxury of dealing directly with rich .NET objects.  If I need to sort, filter, or otherwise process cmdlet output, I have easy access to typed properties and methods right at the prompt. Often, though, I’ll need to wrangle plain text, perhaps from a log file or the output of an executable.  In these cases an intermediate step is required in order to extract the typed information (timestamps, substrings, numerical fields, etc) from th[...]

As much as we people who write code like to talk about code, the biggest challenge in a software project is not code. A project rarely fails because of technology – it usually fails because of miscommunications: the code that is delivered solves a problem (sometimes), but not the right one. One of the reasons we often deliver the wrong solution is that coding involves translating the world of the original problem into a different language. Translating one way is hard enough as it is, but then, rarely are u[...]

I got curious the other day about how to measure the F# community growth, and thought it could be interesting to take a look at this through StackOverflow. As it turns out, it’s not too hard to get some data, because StackExchange exposes a nice API, which allows you to make all sorts of queries and get a JSON response back. As a starting point, I figured I would just try to get the number of questions asked per month. The API allows you to retrieve questions on any site, by tag, between arbitrary dates. R[...]

About a month ago, I vaguely recall a discussion on Twitter – if memory serves me, @rickasaurus was involved – around sharing articles. This inspired me to try something. Every morning, I start my day with an espresso first, followed by reading blog posts for half an hour or so. While I get a lot from these quick reading sessions, I rarely go back to the material afterwards, and thought it would be interesting to keep track of a few, and revisit them at the end of the month. I also decided I would primaril[...]

In my previous post on getting into higher order functions I wrote about how I've been using higher order functions instead of foreach loops. All of the functions defined in that article were immutable, and had no side effects aside from returning data. In real life though, we're forced to deal with side effects all the time (logging, databases, DateTime.Now, etc). This separation was by design and is due to an old (in our industry anyway) principal known as Command Query Separation. Command Query Se[...]