November is going to be a very busy month for me as I’m very happy to announce I’ll be speaking at Stack Overflow Dev Days at London’s ExCeL conference center on the 14th-15th November and the Progressive F# Tutorials at the Skills Matter eXchange on 3rd-4th November.
Lately I’ve been taking a look at how you might write web apps with F# using various existing frameworks. Often these frameworks don’t quite work the way you want them to and have small but annoying nuances when using them from F#. These projects are:
So Silverlight and .NET are dead. The Windows 8 team say so. Sounds familiar, we heard the same thing after PDC 2010? I’m not worried, here’s why.
I guess I came to Scrum and the agile software movement a little late in the day, I got interested in Scrum after attending the 2008 JAOO conference (now the GOTO conference) in Aarhus and then hearing Ken Schwaber talking about Scrum and the “definition of done” on an episode of Hanselminutes (http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=137).
I’m off to Seattle for the MVP summit very soon. I’ve arranged to meet with fellow F# fan’s Cameron Frederick and Richard Minerich at the Tap House Bar in Belleveue at 3:30pm on Sunday. Happy hour start at 3:30pm, so it should be lots of fun. The address of the bar is 550 106th Avenue NE, Bellevue, which is near the hotels for the Summit. So come and join the F#UN!
Recently I’ve doing a little work with Windows Phone 7. One aspect that interests me a lot is the integration of the Accelerometer. An accelerometer is a instrument that allows you to measure the forces acting on the telephone, including the force of gravity. This information will allow you to know what the orientation of the phone is and if the is moving or not. However there are a few challenges in interpreting is information. Firstly, the telephone’s accelerometer, when activated, will generate 50 events per second, so you will need to write code capable of analysing this volume of data. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the only information you are given in this event is a 3D vector that represents the forces acting on the phone along each axis, so interpreting the meaning of this information is not always easy.
So, the good folks at Skills Matter and I have been working hard to bring you the next edition of “Functional Programming eXchange” the program is just about in place now. The current program can be found here and we expect to be adding more names and some more details over the next weeks or so. Book now, or before December 31st and you can still get to see it all for the bargain price of £75.
I’ve been doing a bit of work with Solver Foundation lately and as I got to know the package it suddenly occurred to me Solver Foundation could be easily used to solve Sudoku puzzles. While I knew that solving Sudoku in F# wasn’t particularly an original idea, Jon Harrop has a custom Sudoku solver in F# that dates back to 2007, but I thought using Solver Foundation might be an interesting approach. I was on the train at the time so I fired up VS and pretty quickly had a working solution. A little googling later revealed that I wasn’t at all the first to have thought of this, in fact there’s event a Sudoku example packaged with Solver Foundation, but using the OML solver language rather than F#. Anyway, as I have a working solution I thought I may as well show it here. At 121 lines, including comments, inputs and solution printing functions, I don’t think it’s too bad, however I do think there’s some room to make it even shorter.
The MVVM (Model View View Model) design pattern is a popular way to create WFP (or Silverlight or Windows Phone 7) applications.Despite the obscure name, the design pattern is surprisingly simple. Basically, the programmer creates a view model which is bound the the view (i.e. the xaml) via WFP binding model. Thanks the WPF’s two way bindings, the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and the ObservableCollection<T> there’s very little need for any other direct interactions between the view and the bound model.
I watched with interested Don’s talk at PDC. This blog post is to help me put in perspective some of my initial thoughts on what type providers are, I’ve tried to write it so you don’t need to see the video of the session first, but obviously it will help if you have. Some of this is just my speculation – I have no insider information so I can speculate, but don’t take everything I say too seriously. The talk gave a preview of “Type providers”, an experimental feature in F# that will appear in a future version of F#. The aim of type providers give tighter integration between the F# programming language and external data sources, to allow external data source be accessed in strongly typed way. This is blog post to explain what they are and do a bit of speculation about how they work.