There’s a fair amount of excitement with the recent announcements of the new XBox One and PS4 consoles with exciting new harder specs and TV features. There has never been a better time to own an PS3 or XBox 360. On the “old” consoles there’s a massive back catalogue of quality games to choose from, many at knock down prices or available pre-owned. If you want a console for TV the PS3 has a blu-ray player, an optional remote control and supports services like NetFlix and LoveFilm, it’s also quite quiet. If[...]

After a while websites start to look the same: Af And most websites use the same server-side programming language: And the other programming languages look the same. PHP PHP supports classes these days: class Person { public $firstName; public $lastName; public function __construct($firstName, $lastName = '') { //Optional param $this->firstName = $firstName; $this->lastName = $lastName; } public function greet() { return "Hello, I’m " . $this->firstName . " " . $this->lastName . ".[...]

Press a key to hear a note: GAFBB should sound familiar to fans of 70s sci-fi. I wanted to programmatically generate sound effects for a retro game I’m working on. Generating wave files using F# turned out to be less than 30 lines of code: open System.IO /// Write WAVE PCM soundfile (8KHz Mono 8-bit) let write stream (data:byte[]) = use writer = new BinaryWriter(stream) // RIFF writer.Write("RIFF"B) let size = 36 + data.Length in write[...]

Last night Neil Danson gave a great presentation on F# on iPad and iPhone in Xamarin Studio at the F#unctional Londoners meetup hosted by Skills Matter. Xamarin announced that they were working towards first-class F# support at their recent Evolve conference, and that support is currently in Beta. Xamarin Studio is an IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and Windows and lets you target iOS and Android. Easy to follow instructions: Use F# for iOS development Neil showed how to build a movie database application u[...]

This week our automated tools uncovered a fatal exception before it reached the client. Nick and Anton, 2 of the full-time testers on our team have written a testing tool they call Random Walker that simulates interactions with the user interface as clicks and gestures. It has helped uncover numerous issues, particularly NullReferenceExceptions, more often than not emanating from third-party libraries. It typically finds issues that are not easily found by manual testing or our extensive suite of unit and [...]