Blog on 7sharp9

Myriad Configuration Changes

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I released version 0.8.1 of Myriad, its got some new configuration settings so I thought I would quickly talk about them here.

One year on YouTube

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 12:48:00 +0000

So Ive had my YouTube channel for a year now, how did it go?

Myriad Intro

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 17:08:32 +0000

I released a new meta programming club video yesterday on my YouTube channel

I thought I would write a little about it here on my blog too.

I recently did a little work to flesh out the plugin interface for Myriad. My friend Enrico Sada helped out with some of the fiddly MsBuild work in dotnet which can be a little confusing at times.

Final Month On Patreon

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 11:08:47 +0100

Ive decided that this month is last month I’ll be on Patreon.

Applied Meta-Programming with Myriad

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This article is all about F# metaprogramming and research that I did which evolved over time, firstly with a project called Falanx that I developed while working for Jet/Walmart, then later the ideas and concepts evolved into Myriad.

Building a single page application with Elm

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, its been a very long while since I last blogged, I promised this ages ago, its a partial sample chapter for a book I was planning on Elm but the publisher started to muck me about so it never happened.

I want to tell you a storyboard

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So as promised here’s a post with more detail on the iOS designer provider that I presented as part of my talk at fsharpX 2017 The talk is entitled Expanding the Horizons of Mobile Development

Elmtastic Updates

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

With the release of Elm 0.17 there were some fundamental changes to the Elm language. This post is my attempt to help those that may be struggling with these changes

Creating fuse applications with fable

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

So as promised here’s a guide to creating your first fable |> fuse application

Light The Fuse

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In this post Im going to be introducing something new and exciting the combination of F#, Fable and Fuse.

New Adventures

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

So today was my last day at Xamarin.

flame on

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 29 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks back I posted on Twitter that I was experimenting with flame graphs, In this post I will share how this was accomplished.

Building Emulators in FSharp

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to briefly talk about what I’ve been up to lately. I’ve been doing a spot of compiler hacking, working on improving Type Providers and generally tinkering with concepts relating to macros etc. I’ve also been tinkering with the Elixir and Rust which I quite like too.

F# Community Hero

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ive been meaning to write this post for ages but Ive only just found the time.

On the 3rd of September my good friend Ryan Riley (aka @panesofglass) emailed me letting me know I had won a Community for F# hero award for 2015!

Reckoning day

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve finally been awarded a Microsoft MVP its been quite a long time coming. Ive been nominated for MVP every year since July 2011 but until now I have been unsuccessful. On the 1st of July I received an email congratulating me that I had been successful on my MVP nomination.

Meta-Matic

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sit down, strap in, and prepare for take off, we’re going Meta-Matic!

Are you my type?

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know there was more to the type matching operator than just pattern matching and exception handling?

Terror From The Deep

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

So this is my Christmas special. I’ve been asked on numerous times to write about the F# addin for Xamarin studio which is in the fsharpbinding repo, this repo is shared with the emacs support and also the Sublime Text support. So in this edition we will be taking a deep dive into the terrifying deep depths of the F# compiler and F# addin development…

I saw my reflection and cried ...

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

While I was visiting Boston earlier in the year I had the misfortune of kicking myself in the teeth with reflection. It’s something all programmers inevitably go through with reflection API’s as they are inherently untyped, a simple typo can leave you tearing out your hair or punching through your monitor! Yeah there’s things the horizon that will help namely the nameof expression in C#6 which should help in some areas, that’s if your willing to pay the price of using C#, but I wont go into that here :-). In F# we can leverage Type Providers fairly easily to wrap API usages in cases that we are interested in, or even create a general usage with a little more effort.

Flux Compression (redux)

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

First of all the title, redux because I’m revising post I started on earlier in the year, compression because this has to do with compression, and Flux, which is also part of the redux, one of the first things I remember writing on the net was an article about Flux Compression Generators on H2G2, its still there too!

Anything you can do ...

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For any of you that are aware of the newly updated Xamarin Web site, you may have seen the following:

Objective-C was ahead of its time 30 years ago. C# is ahead of its time today. Anything you can do in Objective-C or Java, you can do in C# with Xamarin—usually more succinctly and with fewer bugs.

Xamarin 3 F# Awesomeness

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

With the release of Xamarin 3 there is a swathe of new features to the platform, but obviously the most important one is obviously F# support is now included by default in Xamarin Studio so there is no escape from the awesomeness of F#!

Danger unstable structure - No more!

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last year a lot of work has been done on the F# addin for Xamarin Studio. Lots of great new features have been added and a lot of bugs have been squashed. I want to talk a bit about whats been happening and the evolution of the F# addin.

Adding Touch To SpriteKit

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Only a quick post this week. Last time we looked at SpriteKit and how to add some particle emmiters to simulate a star-field and exhaust on a spaceship, this time lets look at adding some touch based input to move the spaceship around.

Spritekit particle fun

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have been meaning to write this post for quite a while now. Since the first announcement of the iOS7 beta I immediately saw the list of new API’s and SpriteKit caught my eye straight away. I only managed to get time to briefly look over the API and saw that is wasn’t the usual trashy API with a million method overloads, internal mutation sucker punch type thing. It seems to be very declarative and intuitive, which makes for a nice change.

Can I have some F# with that?

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

There’s been a fair bit of activity lately from a project called ScriptCS, it allows you to put together a project using C# as a lightweight scripting language, forgoing the use of Visual Studio which can sometimes be too bloated and bulky.

Monster Zero - Revisited

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This creature is capable of tremendous destruction due to it’s size, flight (with the creature’s wings also generating hurricane strength winds) and possesses several breath weapons (e.g., heat and energy).

What am I talking about here? Maybe it’s Monster Zero or King Ghidorah as it’s sometimes known. No it’s TPL Dataflow!

Some kind of monster

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What’s 100 meters high and weighs in at around 60,000 tons? No its not Godzilla, its Reactive extensions!

Lately on one of my projects I have been doing a lot of stream manipulation, and although I solved the problem quite easily using F# async workflows, there were other solutions available to help solve the problem. I could of used things like async await, TPL Dataflow(TDF), and Reactive Extensions (Rx). This is going to be a short post on using Rx with F#.

I node something (Bout You)

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

What is Edge.js?
#

Unless you live in a hole you have probably heard of node.js so I’ll not bother to explain what it is or what it does. An interesting project has come to light lately, namely Edge.js. The Edge.js project allows you to connect node.js with .Net.

iOS async revisited

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In this post weare going to look as async again, but from the perspective of F#.

Xamarin Evolve 2013
#

I have been watching the Xamarin Evolve conference this week and it was good to see Miguel announce full support for F#. Those that follow me on twitter etc, will know that I have been doing F# for quite a while in MonoDevelop and Xamarin Studio. The new support currently entails some new project templates so that you can easily create epic new F# Apps without having to refer to my blog. While its sad that my content now falls into the archives its nice to get official support announced in such a grand fashion.

A little bit of iOS async

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was going to title this post as ‘Now for something completely different’ but felt that a little bit too Pythonesque, and when I thought about it a bit it isn’t really completely just slightly different, namely C# rather than my usual F# posts.

MonoTouch and F# part II

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In the last post we left at the point where everything was running fine and dandy on the Simulator. So what happens if we compile for the real hardware?

Lets change the active configuration to Debug|iPhone and hit build, what do we get?

MonoTouch and F# part I

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

MonoTouch and F# that would be a cool duo right?

Well let me explain what needs to be done and why to get this pair working together.

I heard rumours a while ago that F# and MonoTouch would not play together nicely because of limitations in the ahead of time compilation (AOT). So I thought I would either prove or disprove this with some concentrated hacking. How hard can it be?

MonoGame subdivision and platonics

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a break from my normal jovial self due to a shit storm of bad stuff happening that I wont go into here, but hopefully this years going to be awesome. Anyway, here’s the next exciting installment in my series on MonoGame. (Well I find it exciting anyway :-) )

MonoGame 3D basics

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This time we are going to get into a little bit of code and produce the simplest of all 3d solids, the tetrahedron. I know its not the most exciting of things but we have to start somewhere. The scope of 3D graphics in computers is so vast that its very easy to get lost in the vast piles of research papers.

F# and MonoGame on the Mac

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

What we are going to do in this post is take a whistle stop tour of getting MonoGame up and running along with a simple demo in F#. Over the last few days I have been building an F# project template for MonoDevelop, this post will also how to get that installed too.

F# 3.0 In The Mac And Mono World

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So what have I been up to lately? Well, lots of different things. I have been taking it easy on the open source and blogging side of things as its been a hectic time of late in my personal life. This seems to be changing now so I’m starting to get all of the ideas spinning around in my head into physical reality, or virtual reality, or what ever you want to call it. Anyway, here’s the first post on the subject of programming in F# using MonoDevelop and Mono natively on Macs.

Whats in your toolbox?

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If I walk into my garage now and open up a toolbox, whats inside?

Here’s a quick selection:

Ball-peen hammer
Jointer plane
1/2 inch mortise chisel
Soldering iron
Set square
Low angle block plane
Torx screw drivers
Hack saw
Monkey wrench
Pipe cutter

Notice it doesn’t just contain:

The Lurking Horror

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Deep in the darkest depths lurks an ancient horror, when the time is right it will rise forth and leave you screaming for mercy and begging for forgiveness…

OK, I have a penchant for being over dramatic but in this post I am going to reveal some little known caveats in a well known and much revelled area of F#, agents aka the MailboxProcessor. Gasp!

Back to the Primitive II

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the last post I discussed an asynchronous version of the ManualResetEvent and as promised this time we will be looking at an asynchronous version of the AutoResetEvent. I’m using Stephen Toubs post as reference and we will be building a version that is functional in style that maps straight into asynchronous work flows without and conversion or adaptors.

Back to the Primitive

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In this post we are going back to the primitive. No it’s not about the same named song by Soulfly, (which incidentally does contains F# notes) but a return to thread synchronisation primitives and their asynchronous counterparts.

We are going to be looking at an asynchronous version of the ManualResetEvent. This was recently covered by Stephen Toub on the pfx team blog. We will be taking a slightly different view on this as we will be using asynchronous workflows which will give us nice idiomatic usage within F#.

Black-Scholes Taste Test

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In this edition we are going to be doing a taste test, C# vs F#. Oh yeah, if you quickly glanced at the title you may have thought this was a recipe for black scones, as interesting and tasty as that may be, unfortunately its going to be finance related.

FSharp Dataflow agents III

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This will be the last post on rebuilding the MailboxProcessor using TDF, here’s a quick discussion of the missing pieces…

First, lets start with the simple ones, these don’t really require much discussion.

DefaultTimeout
#

let mutable defaultTimeout = Timeout.Infinite

member x.DefaultTimeout
 with get() = defaultTimeout
 and set(value) = defaultTimeout <- value

This simply provides a mutable property using Timeout.Infinite as a default setting.

F# Dataflow Agents Part II

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Right, no messing about this time, straight to the code.

Construction
#

This is pretty straight forward and I don’t want to detract from the important bits of this post, the only thing of note is the cancellationToken which is initialized to a default value using the defaultArg function if the optional parameter cancellationToken is not supplied. The TDF construct that we to use to perform most of the hard work is incomingMessages which is a BufferBlock<'Msg>.

F# Dataflow Agents Part I

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is going to be a new series on using TPL Dataflow with F#. First a little bit of history and background.

TPL Dataflows heritage and background
#

TPL Dataflow or (TDF) has been around for quite a while, it first surfaced more than a year ago as the successor to the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) and with coming release of .Net 4.5 it will be part of the System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow namespace. Elements of the now halted project Axum are also present within the design of TDF.

Fixing a hole...

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Due to popular demand… well, I had a couple of requests anyway :-) Heres a post inspired by my recent encounters profiling some of the code in Fracture-IO. I have recently been profiling the code in fracture to remove any so called low hanging fruits. During this time I also noticed an increase in memory allocation. I remembered I had recently been experimenting in a branch using pipelets as a buffer between the send and receive stages in the Http Server, so I set up a simple test to see if pipelets were contributing to the memory allocation issues I was seeing. Here’s the simple iteration test code I used for the memory profiling:

F# and Design principles - SOLID

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

SOLID and its relevance to F#
#

There has been an increasing amount of exposure for F# and functional programming lately. If you come from an object-orientated background a change in mindset is required when working with functional programming, there is a lot of misinformation on functional languages and their relationship with object-orientated design. In this post we run quickly through SOLID to see if these object-orientated principles apply to F#, and if so, how.

From C# to F#: A Developer's Perspective

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wrote an article for Developer Fusion on the changes in mindset required when moving from C# to F#.

The article has proved to be more more popular than I envisaged. I think a lot of .Net developers are interested in F# but are unsure on the path to take when trying to accomplish this. For me it was almost a leap of faith, I saw the potential benefits and just jumped right in.

Agent based scheduling

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

One of the areas that I am very interested in is agents and I have been doing quite a lot of work in this area lately.

Agents can be used for a multitude of different purposes ranging from: isolated message passing, object caching, finite state machines, web crawling, and even reactive user interfaces. One of the ideas that I have been looking into lately is agent based scheduling.

Agents and ObjectPools

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows F# agents are cool right? Well here’s yet another example of how versatile they can be…

There was a series of posts last April by Stephen Toub from the pfxteam at Microsoft. I was reading through some of the posts again the other day and thought some of the ideas presented there would make interesting projects in F# to demonstrate the flexibility and succinctness of the language. I thought the ObjectPool example would make an interesting project in F# using agents aka MailboxProcessors. An ObjectPool is basically a pool of objects that have been pre-created so that you can grab one and use it, and then place it back in the pool when you’re finished. They are useful in situations where the cost of creating object from scratch is very high or you want to cut down on allocations in the garbage collector.

Pipeline processing 3

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ok so I have been offline for a while now, what with starting a new financial contract in London and not having any broadband access for a while. I have been working on something, honest!

Since the last post I have been reflecting on the pipeline design and it had a distinct object orientated feel to it that I wasnt happy with, so I have amended the structure of the code and come up with the following which simplifies in some areas and expands in others…

Pipeline processing 2

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to pipeline processing part 2.
#

I feel I need to backtrack slightly from the previous post, having worked with pipelines for quite some time I have the advantage of knowing all of the details that may be alluded to in these articles without being effected by any omissions I may make, obviously you guys aren’t in that position, so I’m going to try and rectify that a bit now. If you have any queries then please leave a comment and I will try to address them in further articles. Pipelines are a simple concept but in practice there can be some caveats and things to bear in mind, sometime the whole mindset of development team can be against them unless they can see the bigger picture…

Pipeline processing 1

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to new series of articles on pipeline processing.
#

First up, what’s a pipeline? Well according to Wikipedia:

A pipeline is a set of data processing elements connected in series, so that the output of one element is the input of the next one. The elements of a pipeline are often executed in parallel or in time-sliced fashion; in that case, some amount of buffer storage is often inserted between elements.

Sockets and Bockets 4

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to part 4
#

If you were looking forward to some exciting new F# code this time your going to be disappointed, however if you are like me and like looking at graphs and stats and digging in deeper into the code then your going to enjoy this, lets get started…

Sockets and Bockets 3

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to part three!
#

As promised heres a description of the inner workings. I’m sick to death of typing SocketAsyncEventArgs so from now on I will refer to it as SAEA.

Sockets and Bockets 2

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to part two
#

Lets jump in at the deep end and take a look at some code…

When you look at the method syntax for the xxxAsync methods you will notice they return a boolean value that indicates if the method completed synchronously, this means that you have to check the return value every time you use one of the methods and invoke the callback yourself if it completes synchronously. In practice this hardly ever happens, and normally only on a send operation. But as it is a possibility we will add module with a some extension methods in to help us out, this will make the code more readable and avoid unnecessary duplication.

Sockets and Bockets 1

7sharp9@mail.com (Dave Thomas) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to part 1
#

A while back I read an interesting article by Brian McNamara f-async-on-the-server-side which describes C# and F# versions of a simple asynchronous socket server, one of the driving forces behind the article was how F# can wrap the traditional asynchronous model with Asynchronous Workflows, this produces nice clean simple code compared to the C# version which uses lambda expressions, the code looks quite ugly in this style! However thats not the end of the story, a lot of memory fragmentation can occur using the APM model when there is a high throughput, so I thought I would see if I could take this a step further…