Since the start of the year there’s been an F# meetup every 2 weeks in London at Skills Matter, in the middle of the month we do a hands session and at the end a talk or two. There’s always a good turnout and the group now has over 500 members. Want to get in on the action, there’s a particularly exciting schedule of free events featuring F# in and around London over the coming months: This week .Net in the City with Daniel Egloff on Combining F# and GPUs on Thursday 16th May Next week F# Type Provide[...]

Scanning over Alvin Ashcraft’s excellent Morning Dew (a must read for .Net devs as is Chris Alcock’s Morning Brew), I came across a short article from Richard Carr on writing Fixed Width Data Files using C#. Richard creates a class that inherits from StreamWriter, and all-in it’s just over 50 lines of idiomatic C# code: using System; using System.IO; using System.Text; public class FixedWidthWriter : StreamWriter { public int[] Widths { get; set; } public char NonDataCharacter { get; set; } [...]

At the beginning of the month I gave a 30 minute talk at Cukeup!, an imaginatively named conference for the Cucumber community. The talk was titled Example.Examples,Examples: Talk about BDD and people often think about Given, When and Then. Mention Specification by Example and the focus shifts to tables. This talk will focus on the latter, showing the benefits of giving examples in tabular form for both collaboration and automation. Expect to see real-world scenarios from a trading system, and hear[...]

A few years back I put together a simple Fractal Zoom in Silverlight using gray scales. Time for a little makeover with color: Hold down the mouse button over the Mandelbrot and move the mouse to highlight a rectangle, then release the mouse button to zoom in on that area. Implementation To get a nice colour progression I used the HSB color circle: let H,S,L = 0.95 + (10.0 * n), 0.6, 0.5 Then created a colour lookup table using a list c[...]

Foq is a .Net mocking library with first class support for F# and a cool sounding name. After 9 public releases, Foq is now mature and stable at version 0.9. What started as a 6 to 8 week project ended up more like a half-year project. At this point, I’d like to say a big thank you for the great feedback from the community, and specifically acknowledge the help and support of Mathias Brandewinder, Vasily Kirichenko, Niklas Bergius and Neil Danson. Yesterday the first Foq question appeared on Stack Overflow[...]