I got curious the other day about how to measure the F# community growth, and thought it could be interesting to take a look at this through StackOverflow. As it turns out, it’s not too hard to get some data, because StackExchange exposes a nice API, which allows you to make all sorts of queries and get a JSON response back. As a starting point, I figured I would just try to get the number of questions asked per month. The API allows you to retrieve questions on any site, by tag, between arbitrary dates. R[...]

About a month ago, I vaguely recall a discussion on Twitter – if memory serves me, @rickasaurus was involved – around sharing articles. This inspired me to try something. Every morning, I start my day with an espresso first, followed by reading blog posts for half an hour or so. While I get a lot from these quick reading sessions, I rarely go back to the material afterwards, and thought it would be interesting to keep track of a few, and revisit them at the end of the month. I also decided I would primaril[...]

In my previous post on getting into higher order functions I wrote about how I've been using higher order functions instead of foreach loops. All of the functions defined in that article were immutable, and had no side effects aside from returning data. In real life though, we're forced to deal with side effects all the time (logging, databases, DateTime.Now, etc). This separation was by design and is due to an old (in our industry anyway) principal known as Command Query Separation. Command Query Se[...]

The nice thing about Websharper is that you’re released from writing Javascript. As a pet project I was wondering how much effort it would take to write a simple DataGrid in which you can paste clipboard data, which you copied earlier from MS-Excel. If you want to write something ambitious like a project planning tool, then such a paste function could be useful.So what does excel put on the clipboard if select a rectangle of cells and copy it? In the Desktop world one would deal with the D [...]

Will the real actor please stand up? This week I acted because of some nice Fsharp news.First I visited a presentation of Riccardo Terrell about Akka.NET this week. Sergey Tihon’s  weekly newsletter mentioned that Mono 4.0.0 was released.So let us combine that. I installed Mono before and now to upgrade in Ubuntu (as root):apt full-upgrade mono-completeThis takes a while. And now to install Akka.NET. There is a little problem though, you need to get Akka.NET via nuget, and standard t [...]