Following on from VB.Net’s new basic pattern matching support, the C# team has recently put forward a proposal for record types and pattern matching in C# which was posted in the Roslyn discussion area on CodePlex: Pattern matching extensions for C# enable many of the benefits of algebraic data types and pattern matching from functional languages, but in a way that smoothly integrates with the feel of the underlying language. The basic features are: records, which are types whose semantic meaning is de[...]

The Test Anything Protocol (TAP) is a text-based protocol for test results: 1..4 ok 1 - Input file opened not ok 2 - First line of the input valid ok 3 - Read the rest of the file not ok 4 - Summarized correctly # TODO Not written yet   I think the idea is an good one, a simple cross-platform human readable standard for formatting test results. There are TAP producers and consumers for Perl, Java, JavaScript etc. allowing you to join up tests for cross-platform projects. NUnit runner Over the las[...]

This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting on the Ocean Q&A panel at Revival 2014 in Wolverhampton. I worked at Ocean in Manchester in my early 20s on titles like Jurassic Park (PC & Amiga) and Addams Family Values (SNES & Megadrive). It was fun to reminisce about the good old days with other former Ocean employees and people who’d played the games. The panel closely coincided with the public release of The History of Ocean Software book by Chris Wilkins which was funded as a Kickstarter: There w[...]

Last month Grant Crofton popped down from Leeds to the F#unctional Londoners meetup at Skills Matter to run a fun hands on code golf session. The idea of code golf is to implement a specific algorithm in the fewest possible characters. This is not the kind of thing you should be doing in enterprise code, but it is fun, and an interesting way of exploring features in a programming language. On the night we attempted condensed versions of FizzBuzz and 99 bottles of beer, with Ross and I winning the first c[...]

Following on from F# week, Xamarin have been running a contest to build your first F# mobile app which ends today. If you missed it you can still enter, run an F# app and get a free F# T-shirt. Over the weekend I’ve put together a simple calculator app that includes units of measure support: Getting started I installed the latest version of Xamarin on my Mac. The happy path seems to be the stable release channel these days, as F# is now baked into the IDE. Once it’s installed you can start straight[...]