The more I use F# the more I want to write my every day production C# code in a functional way.  To this end, I’ve written a few higher order extension methods as the need arose.  I wanted to take a moment and share them with you.  I think that in seeing an implementation of these functions in C#, what they do becomes easy to ...

Recently I’ve been working with some local search techniques and wanted to share my Steepest Ascent Hill Climbing solution. The general idea of Steepest Ascent Hill Climbing is that in each iteration of the hill climbing process you apply a set of transforms to your input data and select the best result via a fitness function.  This result, ...

Over this past week at PDC I was lucky enough to see some fantastic sessions and spend time with members of the F# and greater Visual Studio language teams.  Naturally, these experiences have left me both floored and swimming in new ideas.  This edition of Discoveries This Week includes both the very best of what I saw at PDC 2009 and ...

F# events are popping up all over the place and so I’ve included a separate section for them today.  As far as posts go I’ve stumbled across immutable queue and range libraries,  a post on the underlying implementation of discriminated unions, using the reactive framework and finally, a Microsoft research project: F7 Refinement ...

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’m back from my three week vacation and am just about buried in fascinating functional programming links.  I’ve managed to get through most of them and have selected the best of these for this very special welcome back edition of Discoveries This Week.   CUFP (Commercial Users of Functional Programming) 2009 Videos “Functional ...

After spending much time evaluating different approaches, I’ve found a way to easily and reliably grab the URL of my hosting page from inside of a C# based ActiveX Control.  This process involves using dynamic COM invocation to obtain the IWebBrower interface via my ActiveX control’s implicit IOleObject interface.   Introduction ...

This is a post about a serious bug I turned up in the Microsoft C++ compilers that target CLI (both Managed C++ and C++/CLI). One of the key concepts in software engineering is Design by Contract.  Design by Contract boils down to “say what you do and do what you say.”  Essentially, when I make a semantic definition, I would like it to ...

This post is going to cover how to use (and abuse) extension methods to make it easier to write compilers and interpreters or to write code metrics tools. Right now, it’s straight forward to loop over a set of paths, load assemblies (that can be loaded) and then loop over the types and then the methods.  Your code ends up fairly ugly ...