COIL and COILettes
Douglas Crockford started a minor war when he observed that JavaScript's object initialisation syntax provides a neat way to persist hierarchical data, maybe more suitable to some situations than...
View ArticleAsynchronous Sockets with Yield Return of Lambdas
Update: More in-depth stuff about thisI just watched this video of Jeffrey Richter demonstrating his AsyncEnumerator...
View ArticleMore on Jeffrey Richter’s AsyncEnumerator and Functional Programming
If you do asynchronous programming (or have been put off it in the past by the complexity) and you haven’t already looked at this, then you really...
View ArticleOther Examples of Iterators and Async IO
The idea of returning functions via yield return to simply asynchronous IO programming has a precedent in Microsoft's Concurrency and Coordination...
View ArticleOptimizing Aggregate for String Concatenation
Linq lets you think in a very generally applicable way and solve a very wide variety of problems with a few key concepts. That’s a great thing. But it’s irritating when the elegant solution doesn’t...
View ArticleThe Maybe Monad in C#
The Maybe Monad is extremely simple. It represents a value that might be there, but might not, and also provides a neat way of working with such values.This Haskell-related page makes it pretty...
View ArticleOra Stories
I've written an add-in for Visual Studio called Ora. You can read more about it via that link but here's some background to it.It's designed to replace a common use of regions - though I'd call it a...
View ArticleLinq to C++0x
Updated 2009-01-28 - completely different approach to get a fluent interface.Updated 2009-05-22 - See new post with decltype goodness!C++ has long had some functional-styled things in its standard...
View ArticleUsing Collection Initializers with Immutable Lists
The Incomparable Mr Skeet mentions how irksome it is that collection initializers assume that the collection is mutable.Suppose we defined an "immutable-yet-initializable collection" as any type that...
View ArticleFurther Muddying the ForEach Waters
ForEach is regularly proposed as a missing feature in the BCL but has been rejected in the past apparently because it wouldn't be "functional" enough, doesn't return anything so calls cannot be chained...
View ArticleA functional replacement for the using statement
The using-statement is just that: a statement. Why does this bug me?The FileStream object has a Length property. Assuming I have a function Open that returns a FileStream ready for us, it is awfully...
View ArticleDisplaying a nested evaluation tree from Expression
Updated: The downloadable source (see link below) is now tidied up a bit, and also displays any embedded string comparisons in a similar way to NUnit.This might be useful as a way to write Assert...
View ArticleGeneral Theory of Resources
Having blogged the other day about a different way of doing automatic cleanup, I’ve been mulling it over and also answering a question on StackOverflow, and decided that I need to assemble a taxonomy...
View ArticleWhat's Wrong With C# 4.0's dynamic Keyword, and How I Think It Should Be Fixed
Update: Exactly what I want, already implemented, complete with caching of the call site. Also, Microsoft's Mads Torgersen responds to this suggestion here. C# 4.0 proposes to add the dynamic keyword...
View ArticleFatal Exceptions, and Why VB.NET Has a Purpose!
There’s a feature in the CLR that is exposed in VB.NET and not in C#. Apparently this is a deliberate decision made by the C# team, which so far they’ve stuck to. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty important...
View ArticleMaking Lambdas and Iterators Play Nicely Together
The major problem with this idea is in my favourite feature of C#. In an iterator (a function containing the yield keyword), the code is transformed into a state machine represented by a class. It has...
View ArticleThe Amazing Speed of the .NET Garbage Collector
Coming from a C++ background, I always balk at designs that involve lots of small heap allocations. It’s something I’m gradually training myself to stop doing, because in managed code, it’s a...
View ArticleJavaScript Invaders!
Click in the small text field in the top left corner to give allow the game to receive keyboard events.Z = left X = right M = fire
View ArticleReadonly Fields and Thread Safety
In C# you can mark the fields of a type as readonly (indeed you generally should if it's a struct). By doing so, you make it illegal to change the fields except in a constructor of the type.The...
View ArticleGeneral form of C# Object Initializers
C# has a language feature that allows several properties of an object to be assigned to as a suffix to a new expression, namely the object initializer:var myObj = new MyClass { SomeProperty = 5,...
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