At last week’s F# eXchange Robert Pickering gave a talk on Expression Oriented Programming with F#, with one of the slides condensing the only apps you’ll ever write down to 3: In the same week fsharpWorks conducted an F# Survey, the results of which are well worth a look. One of the questions was ‘What kind of learning material would you like to see more of?’ with a popular answer being ‘More material with short "cookbook" style information’. So lets take a look at 2 out of 3 of the only apps you’ll ever[...]

This Friday saw the first ever F# eXchange, a one-day 2 track conference dedicated to all things F#, hosted at Skills Matter in London and attracting developers from across Europe. There was a strong focus on open source projects throughout the day including MBrace (data scripting for the cloud), Fake (a DSL for build tasks), Paket (a dependency manager for .Net), the F# Power Tools and FunScript (an F# to JS compiler). In fact all the presenters used the open source project FsReveal to generate their slid[...]

I came across a topical .Net article by Dave M Bush published towards the tail end of 2014 entitled String and StringBuilder where he correctly asserts that .Net’s built-in string type are reference types and immutable. All good so far. The next assertion is that StringBuilder will be faster than simple string concatenation when adding more than 3 strings together, which is probably a pretty good guess, but lets put it to the test with 4 strings. The test can be performed easily using F# interactive (buil[...]

Just before Christmas I came across some Java source code by “Uncle” Bob Martin aimed at “demystifying compilers” which expends about 600 lines of code to parse the following simple finite state machine: Actions: Turnstile FSM: OneCoinTurnstile Initial: Locked { Locked Coin Unlocked {alarmOff unlock} Locked Pass Locked alarmOn Unlocked Coin Unlocked thankyou Unlocked Pass Locked lock } For fun I knocked up a broadly equivalent parser in F# using FParsec which was just under 40 lines of code, and posted [...]

In my last post I covered the top 100 .Net bloggers since 2008, based on links posted on Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew. This (intentionally) captured many bloggers that are no longer actively blogging, but equally still have interesting content to consume. For completeness here's the ranking for the years 2014 and 2015 (up to last Friday) which may better capture active .Net bloggers: Rank Name 2014  2015  Total 1 Sean Sexton 195 [...]