I’ve found writing unit tests in F# very productive, with it’s terse syntax and powerful type inference. I write F# tests against C# and F# implementations. Writing tests in F# can be a good introduction to the language and this is something we do on our team. To get up to speed quickly you’ll typically want a familiar unit testing framework and mocking library syntax. F# code works with all the popular open source .Net unit testing frameworks: NUnit xUnit mbUnit …it also works with Micro[...]

First things first, a big thanks to the team at Skills Matter particularly Wendy and Anaïs for making this event happen. This year the tutorials were held over 2 days in the atmospheric Crypt in Clerkenwell: Expect a return next year in London and New York. Day 1   Practical Functional-first Programming with F# Friends don't let friends use null An outstanding keynote from Don which built on the talk he gave at the Progressive .Net Tutorials earlier in the year, stacked full of nuggets.[...]

Razor is a programming syntax for dynamic ASP.Net web pages released in 2011. Here’s a C# syntax example from W3 Schools: <!-- Single statement block --> @{ var myMessage = "Hello World"; } <!-- Inline expression or variable --> <p>The value of myMessage is: @myMessage</p> <!-- Multi-statement block --> @{ var greeting = "Welcome to our site!"; var weekDay = DateTime.Now.DayOfWeek; var greetingMessage = greeting + " Today is: " + weekDay; } <p>The greeting is: @greetingMessage</p> Here’s an exam[...]

This year I had the privilege of attending and speaking at the Strangeloop conference in St Louis. The venues, the Union Street Marriot (a National Historic Landmark), and the Peabody Opera House were spectacular. The range of sessions and speakers was literally mind boggling. Some of my favourites: Computing Like the Brain – Jeff Hawking How Plato and Aristotle invented modern programming – Matt Butcher Measuring political ideology in R – Drew Conway & Miles White Handling big data with [...]

This week I had a dig through the old Commodore VIC-20 cassette tapes I had languishing in the garage and stumbled upon a game I was working on, just for fun, when I was about 11 or 12. After playing it on a genuine 8-bit 3.5K VIC, I managed to read the tape into my laptop using Tapir, and then run it on the Vice emulator. It’s not quite up to Jeff Minter’s standards but here it is for posterity: It's a scrolling space game where you avoid the walls of a cavern and collect fuel, and features a bizarre [...]