Avoid Duplicating Code It’s great that so many C# and VB.NET developers are taking advantage of LINQ. Unfortunately, using LINQ can encourage you to misuse lambdas. Consider the following simple example: Square is a useful utility function. It shouldn’t be defined as a lambda because that ensures code duplication instead of reuse. It’s more obvious [...]
Some of the feedback that we’ve received about Elevate has to do with Option types and how they are different or similar to Nullable types in C#. Luke Hoban does a great job of describing some of the differences here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=470052 If you’ve played around with Option types in F# or another functional language, you [...]
The past few weeks, a few other SRT Solutions developers and I have been working on a new open source library called Elevate. We went public with the source on CodePlex this weekend, and although we’re still in the early stages of development, I already rely on many of the functional programming features of the [...]
During CodeMash this past January, I had the opportunity to talk with Chris Smith about F#. One of the things that he considered to be a sweet spot for the language was programming “in the small”. At the time, I didn’t completely agree with his claim, but after writing more F# and functional C# code, [...]
This post is the fourth in a series of posts about the code behindPaintWars. In this series, I will be talking about how the design and implementation of the game differed in C# and F#. Along the way, I’ll also be talking about some of the fun and exciting features of the F# language and [...]
I’m taking a post off from the Paint Wars posts, but I think this one is worth it. Many languages have nice syntactic sugar for creating a sequence of numbers. Usually, the syntax says something like: The expression "1..5" expands to the list "1, 2, 3, 4, 5". This syntax lets you do fun things [...]
This post is the third in a series of posts about the code behind PaintWars. In this series, I will be talking about how the design and implementation of the game differed in C# and F#. Along the way, I’ll also be talking about some of the fun and exciting features of the F# language [...]
[UPDATE: When I first posted this, I used the term currying to describe partial function application. Though they are related concepts, they mean different things. Since this post is more about partial function application than currying, I have corrected the terminology below.] C# doesn’t have language supp1ort for currying, but that doesn’t mean that you [...]
