After reading this old post by Don Syme, I really liked the idea of wrapping the result of any computation into an option type to signify success and failure cases and stop subsequent computations on the first failure. It’s neat but I wanted to tweak a couple of things to make it more useful: exceptional [...]

In C#, you define an empty class, struct, or interface like this: So how do you define an empty type in F#? Well, whenever you define a new class in F#, the compiler infers the class and end tokens at the beginning and end of the class’s definition, as you can see from below: So [...]

There’re a number of built-in literal types in F#, and one of the cool things you can do is to get the byte or byte array representation of a char or string using the ‘B’ suffix, the result is the same as Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes: Pretty cool, eh?

Generic type parameters were introduced in C# 2.0, and they gave us the ability to write code that works against any type that matches a set of constraints and remove the need to create type-specific overloads, e.g.: A few years passed, and dynamic types was introduced in C# 4, which allows us to bypass compile-time [...]

A little while ago I put together a quick performance test comparing the BCL’s BinaryFormatter with that of Marc Gravell’s protobuf-net library (.Net implementation of Google’s protocol buffer format). You can read more about my results here. There’s another fast binary serialization library which I had heard about before, MessagePack, which claims to be 4 [...]