As a C++11 programmer you’ve probably played with type inference and lambda functions and may now feel curious about trying a functional first programming language like F#. F# is a first class .Net programming language that ships with Visual Studio. Although C# shares the familiar moustache based syntax of C++, you may like me actually find F# more familiar in terms of power features like immutability, function inlining and even sprintf . Comparing some of the good parts of C++11 with C# and F#: [...]

I’ve heard a few times that I have a great face for radio ;). Here’s 3 recordings from this year where I get my radio head on and talk about F#. Why F#? with Richard Minerich and Phillip Trelford Interview with Scott Hanselman (March 2012)   Phil Trelford on Functional Architectures, F# Interview with Werner Schuster (May 2012)   Phil Trelford Codes in F# 3.0 Interview with Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell (August 2012)   My next gig is Strangeloop later this month, hope to see you there: F#[...]

Boilerplate is any seemingly repetitive code that shows up again and again, like getting and setting instance variables, but seems like it ought to be much simpler. Jon Harrop recently commented on an MSDN article on Functional Programming in C++: (from Figure 8) 60 lines of "functional" C++ in 1 line of F#: type Immutable = {d: float; s: string} http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/… 60 lines is a lot of boilerplate! Here Jon defines a 1line record type to express a simple immutable type. C# [...]

This is a meta post to coincide with posting over 100 articles over 4 years, going back over some the more popular along with some of my own personal favourites. I started blogging regularly back in 2007 on the Applied Games Group blog, here’s a selection from there:  Composing a video game in F# Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) 2007 F# Custom Exceptions Then in 2008 I started this blog with the motivation of keeping a record of some of the things I’ve learned while improvi[...]

A popup is a window without a standard border that pops up above other controls to display contextual information like a tooltip, context menu or validation error. Silverlight’s browser heritage means it’s built-in popups may appear clipped inside their parent window. When running on the desktop, as an out-of-browser full-trust application, it would be nice to have popups that appear outside of their parent window, as they do in WPF and WinForms, Borderless Silverlight 5’s native window support makes [...]