Are you tired of generating strongly typed classes with millions of lines of C# using crmsvcutil.exe that often crashes?  Fed up with having to re-generate the classes every time something in the schema changes?  Feeling restricted by the LINQ provider's limitations?  Ever wonder why you should need to know what attribute joins to what in your relationships to perform your joins? F# to the rescue! I am working on a F# type provider than aims to solve a lot of these pains, and more besides!  This is just a [...]

I currently do a lot of Office type automation work where I scan a bunch of email from exchange, download excel attachments, open and transform a bunch of data from them, reconcile these against databases using FLinq, produce graphs and charts with the results using FSharpChart, and so forth. (p.s - as a side note, F# is awesome at doing this kind of thing, I can knock all kinds of stuff out super fast.  p.p.s - Active patterns with Excel = win) As anyone who has done any office automation will know, clean[...]

It’s been forever since I last posted, I worked quite a bit on PezHack and then stopped for a while.  I’m back to it now.  In this post I will describe a technique I used to greatly reduce the amount of code and abstract away some repetitive imperative code. The Problem PezHack is a turn based game. The screen does not re-render itself all the time like a real-time game, but only when something changes and at the end of a the player’s turn.  The agent-based approach I used to separate the various sub syste[...]

Introduction In my quest to learn the functional paradigm, one thing I have struggled with is game development. Assuming I mostly stick to the functional style of having little to no mutable state, how do you go about writing games? Games are pretty much ALL mutable state. Obviously, in a multi-paradigm language like F# you can have mutable state - and if used judiciously this can be very effective (not to mention offer some significant performance improvements). The blend of imperative and functional styl[...]