When you are handed a string, integer, or any value type, can you know what it really represents?  Can you define the range of appropriate behaviors for that data?  Can you tell if it's formatted correctly?   The problem is, in all of these cases, you can't.  You can't be sure of it's meaning, it's format or even how to ...

I'll be at New England Code Camp 10 tomorrow giving another talk about functional programming and concurrency in F#.  It will be fairly similar to my previous talks in terms of ideas and content, however, I have put a lot of work into making the functional programming ideas easier to understand. The code samples have also been updated ...

VSLab has just been updated with full support for Visual Studio 2008 Shell and the F# CTP release. It has been a rough couple of weeks for the VSLab team as F# CTP changed a number of things and they have been working hard to put together a compatible release. In this article I talk about a bit about what exactly VSLab is and walk you through ...

Visual Studio Shell was released in January of 2007 without much fanfare.  Even though it's free to download, at the time it was not very useful for most developers as few packages had yet been written for it.  Now eight months have gone by and quite a few projects are sporting free Visual Studio interfaces.  In this article I ...

It has come to my attention via a recent DZone article that .NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you manipulate the way your garbage collector acts programmatically.  This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you ...

I am down in Bloomfield, CT today at Hartford CodeCamp which has been put on by the Connecticut .NET Developer's Group. I just gave a very similar version my talk on the 5th. The room was completely full and I was a bit weak and foggy from my recent illness but with my audience's help I was able to pull together with a decent presentation. I am ...

I'm going to be giving a presentation at the my local .NET User's group tonight. The goal of my talk will be to expose the audience to F# as well as some Functional Programming Ideas.  Here's a basic rundown of what the talk is about (in order): - What F# is and why it's important- A very basic rundown of F# syntax- The ease of ...

It's time to leave the secondary, external structure of our programs behind. If you can treat the reflected code from a programming language like an abstract data structure, why can’t you just keep the source itself in a similarly abstracted data structure? Isn’t the structure of a program more similar to a graph, than a list? Besides the momentum ...

Tuning the garbage collector to the specific context of the particular application can significantly improve the performance of both non-threaded and multi-threaded applications. In this post I discuss the gcConcurrent and gcServer settings which allow you to exercise some control how the Garbage Collector operates.   Articles in This ...

One of the most often cited reasons to not use .NET is that it is initially compiled to an intermediary language (MSIL) and has to be recompiled every time you run it. In many high performance environments this wasted time is simply unacceptable. To combat this Microsoft released a tool with .NET 1.1 called NGen (Native Image Generator) which ...