Did you know that it is the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language today? (1st May) No? Well why not!  BASIC is the language that brought computers to the mainstream.  Back in the day, if you had a computer, you learnt how to program it in basic.  Infact, when you switched it on, that’s what you were presented with.  These computers wanted to be programmed. Thousands of people purchased these expensive computers purely to learn how to program them. I figured I should do something to mark the an[...]

Tomas Petricek posted an article recently about how he used F# to solve a puzzle he had been given for Christmas.  This reminded me of several similar mini-projects I have developed in the past, the most recent being a program to help solve a specific sort of puzzle in the game Puzzle Quest, which I shall now describe. Puzzle Quest is a match-3 game, with various game modes.  One game mode in particular, “Capture”, has a specific layout of tiles which can be matched in a certain way to leave no tiles behin[...]

Someone asked me what the secret type provider I am working on is.  I neglected to tell them, and instead joked that it would be the Don Syme type provider.  Later I reflected that the idea had actually been a stroke of genius, so just knocked this together in 20 of your English minutes – the Don Syme fact provider!  It will produce an endless stream of true facts about the mystery man known as the Father of F#.  Get it from my github here.  

Being able to play Mine Sweeper inside your IDE via intellisense, that is what you have always wanted right?  Well, I’m always willing to lend a hand!  With this fantastic new type provider you can pretend you are working when really you are avoiding mines.   To get started simply clone and build the provider from here.  Reference your new shiny type provider library from a script file and create a type alias and then an instance of it like so: The three parameters you can pass determine the grid width, h[...]

Introducing my latest top-o-the-line type provider that everyone wants and needs. The Squirrelify provider!  This very useful type provider will create an INFINITE type system and show you random pictures of ASCII art in intellisense.  It turns out that intellisense was not really designed for this and it struggles with various formatting and layout, but the provider tries the best it can. It also doesn't have many images as I couldn't find a webservice for them and had to do it manually. "Wow Ross!" I hea[...]