Introduction: The Message Passing interface (MPI) provides a standard way to distribute functions/objects/data across a cluster of systems -- whether embarrassingly parallel, or something more robust.  It’s an amazingly simple api to get started with, though working out how to send and receive the messages in the right order can get a ...

A couple of months ago I was talking to Lou Franco, the head of our Software Engineering department and fellow functional programming enthusiast, about the possibility of using F# for projects in the future.  Being business minded, he replied that he would need a compelling reason to bring F# on board.  This presentation is dedicated to ...

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I am no fan of the System.Drawing namespace.  It’s a rush job thinly wrapped layer on top of GDI+.  A great deal is only partially implemented and there is quite a lot of undocumented behavior.  Today I hope to help a bit with this problem by running some tests on System.Drawing.dll ...

Jake and I just got into an interesting problem while working on search functions for VizitSP. My code was using types from Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, which is not available if SearchServer is not installed, so trying to access search functions results in “assembly cannot be loaded” exceptions. So, how do we detect the SearchServer in ...

What do you think about the following code: byte[] privateParams, publicParams; using (var rsa = new System.Security.Cryptography.RSACryptoServiceProvider()) { privateParams = rsa.ExportCspBlob(true); publicParams = rsa.ExportCspBlob(false); } using ...

Note to self: dearest Dan! If you happen to use ILMerge with an exe file, please make sure you check the app.config file. Why?  Well, suppose you have a custom settings section in your app.config, just like this: <configSections> <sectionGroup name="Atalasoft"> <!-- Converter service settings section: ...

This week we have RegEx Processing, Infinite Types, and some mathy code sample blogs I’ve stumbled upon.   Steve Horsfield has completed his F# Regular Expression Processor This post completes this mini-series on regular expression processing in F#.  You can find the complete source code here as well.  It has been a good ...

With the impending release of Visual Studio 2010, the F# Community continues to wind up.  This week we have finally gotten our F# User Group Videos up.  In addition, we also have a wide ranging selection of fresh F# content including Units of Measure, XML parsing, WPF Games and Pattern Matching.   New England F# User Group Talks ...

What can you extract from the following dialogue between Prospect and Employee? P: Which formats does <application name> support? E: Which one are you interested in? P: Err… Give me all you have! E: We support many formats, including… which one you were interested in again? One can, with certain level of confidence, ...

I blogged recently about testing parallel code in NUnit. I think I settled with requirements: I want to use threads; I want to use assertions in threads; I want to control how threads step on each other; Too bad that solutions I tested did not fit 100%. So I came up with a small (200 lines of code) tool called “Sync” that meets my ...