In this post, we are going to create a Converter class who converts values to strings. The conversion rules are specified by passing the name of a culture to the class’ constructor. The culture name can contain just the language (as ISO 639-1 alpha-2 code, e. g. “en”) or the language and region (as ISO 3166 code, e. g. “US”) combined with hyphen, e. g. “en-US”. An empty culture name “” specifies the invariant culture, which falls back t[...]

Introduction In my quest to learn the functional paradigm, one thing I have struggled with is game development. Assuming I mostly stick to the functional style of having little to no mutable state, how do you go about writing games? Games are pretty much ALL mutable state. Obviously, in a multi-paradigm language like F# you can have mutable state - and if used judiciously this can be very effective (not to mention offer some significant performance improvements). The blend of imperative and functional styl[...]

I’m sure every seasoned .NET developer has been in the situation at one stage or another, probably in testing code, where they need to access a non-public setter of a property (or maybe a private member), and it can’t be mocked.  We all know the (somewhat scary) reflection trick to get at the said setter method and invoke it.   I just hit this problem today trying to mock some response messages from a Microsoft Dynamics XRM 2011 OrganizationService.  Thankfully F# gives us cool things like Quotations and s[...]

Most of the developers have dealt with calling SQL server stored procedures from their applications at least once or twice. In my last project, where intense data mining is done on the SQL side, this is basically all I am doing. There is always a desire to wrap and abstract the ever-repetitive code to get […]

I noticed this morning that Google patent search returns 189 results for the query “homomorphic encryption." I have written about homomorphic encryption in the past; it is a true mathematical breakthrough which has the potential to transform cloud computing security. But the emphasis, here, is on “potential.” There is no fully homomorphic encryption scheme which [...]