It’s been forever since I last posted, I worked quite a bit on PezHack and then stopped for a while.  I’m back to it now.  In this post I will describe a technique I used to greatly reduce the amount of code and abstract away some repetitive imperative code. The Problem PezHack is a turn based game. The screen does not re-render itself all the time like a real-time game, but only when something changes and at the end of a the player’s turn.  The agent-based approach I used to separate the various sub syste[...]

In this post, we are going to create a Converter class who converts values to strings. The conversion rules are specified by passing the name of a culture to the class’ constructor. The culture name can contain just the language (as ISO 639-1 alpha-2 code, e. g. “en”) or the language and region (as ISO 3166 code, e. g. “US”) combined with hyphen, e. g. “en-US”. An empty culture name “” specifies the invariant culture, which falls back to “en”. The class has only one conversion method ToString, who is generi[...]

In this post, we are going to create a Converter class who converts values to strings. The conversion rules are specified by passing the name of a culture to the class’ constructor. The culture name can contain just the language (as ISO 639-1 alpha-2 code, e. g. “en”) or the language and region (as ISO 3166 code, e. g. “US”) combined with hyphen, e. g. “en-US”. An empty culture name “” specifies the invariant culture, which falls back t[...]

Introduction In my quest to learn the functional paradigm, one thing I have struggled with is game development. Assuming I mostly stick to the functional style of having little to no mutable state, how do you go about writing games? Games are pretty much ALL mutable state. Obviously, in a multi-paradigm language like F# you can have mutable state - and if used judiciously this can be very effective (not to mention offer some significant performance improvements). The blend of imperative and functional styl[...]

I’m sure every seasoned .NET developer has been in the situation at one stage or another, probably in testing code, where they need to access a non-public setter of a property (or maybe a private member), and it can’t be mocked.  We all know the (somewhat scary) reflection trick to get at the said setter method and invoke it.   I just hit this problem today trying to mock some response messages from a Microsoft Dynamics XRM 2011 OrganizationService.  Thankfully F# gives us cool things like Quotations and s[...]