After a few philosophical blog posts, I decided it was time for something a bit more concrete. I’ve been playing around a bit with F# and some web stuff recently using both RavenDB and PicoMvc so I thought I’d share with you how to create an autocomplete drop down using these technologies. Creating an autocomplete in a HTML form is fairly common these days and there’s a nice jQuery plugin that takes care of the UI side of things. So the heavy lifting that remains, although it’s not really that heavy, is l[...]

Interested in presenting at a conference on functional programming? Want to reach out to a potentially huge audience? Don’t mind the feeling of speaking alone to a webcam? Then Functional.net is for you! Please check it out and submit a talk. This is all going down on February 17, 2012 (tentative), and we’d love to [...]

I used to find projects with a few large files (1000+ loc) distasteful. Of late, I’m starting to find large numbers of nested folders and files distasteful. Is it just a case of “the grass is always greener?” I don’t think so. I use the VsVim plugin for Visual Studio at work and at home. [...]

Like so many geeks I’m a massive XKCD fan. But I’m often troubled by questions like when will the 1000th XKCD appear, or the 1024th or even the 2000th? Even though the first two numbers are getting quite close now, it’s still more fingers and toes than I have so working it out by hand is out. Fortunately we have computers to this kind of heavy lifting for us, and the solution in F# is kinda cute. We need 3 pieces of information to be able to work out when any given XKCD will appear: an epoch date and numb[...]

The iteratee is continuing to hang me up. I’m very close, but in the meantime, I’ll be focusing on convincing Scott Hanselman that he really should care about functional programming. (Note that I will not be attempting to convince him of the importance of F#.)