This Saturday saw the Developer Developer Developer! (DDD) East Anglia conference in Cambridge. DDD events are organized by the community for the community with the agenda for the day set through voting. T-Shirts The event marked a bit of a personal milestone for me, finally completing a set of DDD regional speaker T-Shirts, with a nice distinctive green for my local region. Way back in 2010 I chanced a first appearance at a DDD event with a short grok talk on BDD in the lunch break at DDD Reading. Since[...]

Earlier this year I had a play with Microsoft’s new compile to JavaScript language, TypeScript. Every man and his dog has a compile to JavaScript solution these days. TypeScript’s angle appears to be to provide optional static typing over JavaScript and some ES6 functionality while compiling out to ES3 by default. It provides a class based syntax similar to C#’s and seems to be aimed at developer’s attempting to scale out JavaScript based solutons. Last year I ported Elm’s Mario sample to F#, which ended [...]

Back at the start of the year, I took the F# parser combinator library FParsec out for a spin, writing an extended Small Basic compiler and later a similar parser for a subset of C#. Previously I’d been using hand rolled parsers, for projects like TickSpec, a .Net BDD library, and Cellz, an open source spreadsheet. With FParsec you can construct a parser relatively rapidly and easily using the powerful built-in functions and F# interactive for quick feedback. FParsec has been used in a number of interesti[...]

Following on from VB.Net’s new basic pattern matching support, the C# team has recently put forward a proposal for record types and pattern matching in C# which was posted in the Roslyn discussion area on CodePlex: Pattern matching extensions for C# enable many of the benefits of algebraic data types and pattern matching from functional languages, but in a way that smoothly integrates with the feel of the underlying language. The basic features are: records, which are types whose semantic meaning is de[...]

The Test Anything Protocol (TAP) is a text-based protocol for test results: 1..4 ok 1 - Input file opened not ok 2 - First line of the input valid ok 3 - Read the rest of the file not ok 4 - Summarized correctly # TODO Not written yet   I think the idea is an good one, a simple cross-platform human readable standard for formatting test results. There are TAP producers and consumers for Perl, Java, JavaScript etc. allowing you to join up tests for cross-platform projects. NUnit runner Over the las[...]