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 ...

I’ve recently been building an ActiveX Control in .NET 2.0 and thought I would share some of the problems I’ve run into, as well as their solutions.  I hope that in reading this you can avoid a few of the timesinks I fell into.    Safe for Scripting By default, ActiveX controls are not marked as safe for scripting.  ...

With the start of our F# User’s Group this next Monday and New England Code Camp 11 last weekend, things have been extremely busy this past week.  Meanwhile, the F# sociocosm is growing at a rapid pace.  This week we have a talk by Don Syme, a look at F# quotations, and finally, some discussion on Seq.unfold.   Chris Bowen’s Post, ...

This week we have MapReduce, WebTools and yet another F# to C# language comparison.  I spent yesterday at a seminar led by Michael de la Maza.  He, Talbot Crowell and I will soon be starting a F# user’s group in Boston, Massachusetts.  I’m interested in any comments you might have.  Please feel free to send me an email if you ...

While in most cases there is no explicit information in an assembly as to which languages it was compiled from, it is possible to make an educated guess as to which languages were used.  This is due to the fact that each different .NET compiler leaves it’s own unique type of fingerprint.  In this article I discuss both my methodology for ...

This week we have practical examples of Lazy Evaluation with Memoization, an interview with Don Syme and a discussion on the Visitor Pattern’s place in F#.  Also, any comments on the new title for my weekly posting would be appreciated.   Forum – Memoization and Lazy Evaluation in F# on HubFS In this thread brianmcm (Brian ...

A wide range of subjects this week including testing, concurrent performance, exception handing and data structures.   Software – FsStory, a library for writing executable user stories in F# I feel that F#, with it’s concise syntax, is an ideal framework for writing tests.  Combined with FsStory F# is made much more powerful in this ...

Since we’ve recently released VizitSP it’s time to start talking about more things SharePoint.  Quickly, I’m going to show you how we’ve used TypeMock’s Isolator for SharePoint along with NUnit and TestDriven.NET to test our use of SPSecurity’s static method RunWithElevatedPrivileges().  The main problem I found was that SPSecurity had ...

This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of interaction between different .NET languages.  I will cover all of the major Microsoft languages: C#, Visual Basic, F# and C++/CLI. In this first post in the series I will build a four language project in Visual Studio 2008 and begin to explore inter-language inheritance.  One of ...