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 ...

In this post I compare and contrast Haskell and F#.  It may come as no surprise that with so much shared history they share so much in common.  However, it’s interesting to consider how the perspectives of the languages’ developers play a large role in determining the differences between the languages.   A Shared History As far ...

This week’s theme is functional programming.  Included are discussions on Software Transactional Memory, Functional Architecture and the impact of the CLR on functional Programming in .NET.   Blog: Brandon Werner’s Software Transactional Memory: Debunked! In starting with a title that is decidedly sensationalistic, Brandon effectively ...

Did you know that .NET provides an easy way to interact and control console programs?  In this article I will walk you through this process by creating a wrapper class for Google’s Tesseract OCR application.  At the end of this post, I will provide a complete WinForms-based frontend for Google’s Tesseract OCR Engine.   Initial ...

There has been much talk of how we will be writing all of our new code with parallelization in mind.  However, what of our existing code?  It’s unlikely that everyone will just suddenly dump decades of existing code and write everything from scratch.  In this article I’m going to provide a simple methodology for how we might deal ...

Yesterday, my coworker Lou Franco pointed me to a fantastic talk by Anders Hejlsberg on the future of programming languages.  In this talk Anders argues that the future of programming language development will be focused on three events: the explosion in the use of Dynamic Languages, the creation of many new Domain Specific Languages and the ...

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 ...

Because .NET Streams have state, they are difficult to use in multithreaded environments. In this post I discuss ways to manage or work around problems arising from the statefulness of .NET Streams. I explain how this is possible both through traditional inheritance and also through some indulgence in hacking of object protection levels by ...

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 ...

Microsoft Research has released some exciting information about a new tool being worked on by Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman.  DOLOTO promises to greatly speed the loading of web applications. It does this by automatically making parts of the application load in the background or lazy load when they are needed. The results look extremely ...