One of the things that’s always bugged me when using Windows UI libraries like WinForms and WPF is the sheer number of members that pop up in intellisense for a control. The Button type in WPF has around 300 members and a total of 9 levels of inheritance making it hard to find the useful members. Or to put it another way the inherited members occlude the useful members: The picture above shows what you actually see in the code completion box in the editor, however for a button you’re probably more interes[...]

Welcome to the 2015 F# Advent Calendar and one of 2 posts for December 3rd. For last year’s advent calendar I tried to follow the seasonal theme and produced an article on generating snowflakes. This year I thought I’d be more literal and look at producing calendar types using F#’s Type Provider mechanism resurrecting a project from 2014, FSharp.Date. FSharp.Date FSharp.Date is a simple F# Type Provider, inspired by VB.Net’s date literal feature,that lets you define dates and time values in F# by pressing [...]

Next week I’ll be heading over to the US for some tourism with a little speaking along the way: Sat 17th Oct – F# Gotham event (NYC) Sunday night flight to Seattle Mon 19th Oct – F# Seattle User Group Tuesday morning train to Portland Tue 20th Oct – Portland F# Meetup  Thursday afternoon flight to San Fran Thu 22nd Oct  - San Francisco F# Meetup Friday afternoon flight to LA! Hope to see some of you on the way, and a big thanks to Rachel Reese and Jet.com for inviting me across the pond! :) P.S. To se[...]

Earlier in the year I came across a Stanford coding assignment inspired by Andrej Bauer’s Random Art. Pictures are built using randomly chosen mathematical expressions that take an x and y value and return a colour. The implementation on Andrej’s site uses OCaml, but is closed source, however a clear Python example is given. F# version The Python version worked out-of-the-box but took a while to render (10s of seconds) so I rewrote it in F# (a language based on OCaml) to improve generation time (to less t[...]

Go is a programming language developed at Google, loosely based on C, adding garbage collection and built-in concurrency primitives (goroutines). I’ve looked at Go briefly in the past, at a Strangeloop workshop in 2012 and later reading An Introduction to Programming in Go, but until now not really done anything with it. Recently I’ve been hearing some positive things about Go, so I thought I’d give it a go this evening on a simple task: downloading and unzipping a Nuget package. Some language highlights:[...]