This week I had the please of attending GOTO Copenhagen - a 3 day developer conference covering a diverse range of topics. Day 1 I started the day on the excellent Beyond the Microsoft Echo Chamber track taking in: Mark Seeman on Bending AutoFixture to your will Tobias Gedell on Eden: An F#/WPF framework for building GUI tools Glenn Block on Breaking the Barrier with Node.js on Windows and Azure Mark demonstrated his open source project AutoFixture aimed at writing maintainable unit tester[...]

The growth of Agile and associated techniques like TDD and BDD has put a significant focus on delivering functional requirements via stories and automated tests. This is in part a side effect of the productivity of teams often being measured in terms of story points, bug counts and test coverage. Unfortunately this can leave non-functional requirements like performance as secondary concerns. Clearly premature optimization is the root of all evil (actually I find micro-optimization a better euphemism); th[...]

Fizz-Buzz or Bizz Buzz is a word game, popularized by Jeff Atwood in the article: Why Can’t Programmers… Program? The game has been turned into a simple programming test: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of 3 print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of 5 print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both 3 and 5 print "FizzBuzz". If you’re involved in hiring programmers then the article is probably worth a read. This kind of problem ca[...]

This week I had pleasure of meeting Vagif Abilov on Tomas Petricek and I’s Advanced F# course at Skills Matter. Vagif mentioned a Ruby implementation of Conway’s Game of Life being squeezed into 140 characters for tweeting and how that might look in F#. Here’s the 140 characters of Ruby: life=->g,s{(0..s*s-1).map{|i|->n{n==3||(g[i]&&n==2)||nil} [[g[i-s-1],g[i-s],g[i-s+1],g[i-1],g[i+1],g[i+s-1],g[i+s],g[i+s+1]] .compact.count]}}   And 137 characters of F#: let f s g = g|>List.mapi(fun i x->match x,Seq.sumBy[...]

The first stable release of the Silverlight 5 Multi-Window Controls project is now available on CodePlex which brings external window support to the ChildWindow and ContextMenu. So what’s next if anything? I came across Tim Heur’s Silverlight FloatableWindow project on CodePlex, that adapts the ChildWindow control for non-modal use, and has attracted over 10,000 downloads! With Silverlight 5 it should be possible to have floating windows that in desktop mode (also known as out-of-browser or OOB mode) c[...]