Android games are now out-selling games for Sony and Nintendo handhelds. Thanks to the nice people at Xamarin you can now develop Android and iOS apps using all your favourite .Net languages: Now it has been possible to target F# on Android and iOS for some time. In the latest release FSharp.Core is included and a blessed dll for the 64kb limit on trial versions. Windows You can use Xamarin.Android inside Visual Studio 2012 on Windows, which is how I got started. But I’d recommend giving Xamarin Stud[...]

While working on another game idea I bumped into a collision detection sample using the Processing language where you can draw walls for a ball to bounce off. It reminded me of SoundDrop on iOS. Here’s my own mashup using the collision detection code, Tomas Petricek’s reactive rectangles sample for the lines and a generated tremolo sound effect. Along the way I found a “Chrome Experiment” version in JavaScript called BallsDropping and a very cute mult[...]

I’ve had the pleasure of working with and interviewing C# developers for over a decade now. However here’s 5 common misconceptions I continue to encounter. 1) Lists are implemented as linked lists List<T> is actually implemented using an underlying array. The name is a little misleading with the earlier non-generic version having the less ambiguous name of ArrayList and in F# they are aliased to ResizeArray to avoid confusion. Needless to say the performance characteristics of operations on an array are [...]

In the last week or so I've seen a popular article and a presentation which didn’t paint the rosiest of pictures for the next generation of coders: Marc Scott’s Kids Can't Use Computers... And This Is Why It Should Worry You Brett Victor’s The Future of Programming I have to agree with Marc Scott that the Information & Communication Technology (ICT) GCSE widely studied in the UK, with Microsoft Office as a focus, seems a bit of a step backwards. The Computer Studies O-level I remember from the m[...]

Last night I ran a free hands on Generative Art session to a full class room at Skills Matter for the F#unctional Londoners meetup group. We host a hands on programming sessions every month, next month we’ll return to the Machine Learning theme with Matt Moloney from the Tsunami IDE team. Generative Art Hands On with F# from ptrelford Samples: http://trelford.com/GenerativeArt.zip I recently picked up Matt Pearson’s Generative Art book published by Manning, his examples use the Processing programmi[...]