Busy times at Basta in Germany: one workshop and one session down, two sessions and my brilliant game show to go!

Since the conference organizers typically take a little while to make the materials available themselves – hundreds of sessions, so that’s to be expected – here are the downloads for all my sessions here. I hope you’ll still come in and take a look :-)

A day of F#
Die Zukunft von C#
Der Vorteil der Statik – Immutable Data
Concurrency using functional patterns in C#

Hope to see you at the Millionair game show Wednesday night, 8:45pm!

I’ve already posted about talking at dotNed in Amsterdam last Thursday, but somehow I forgot to attach the samples and slides from that talk. So here goes:

ConcurrencyusingfunctionalpatternsinCSharp.zip

Have fun!

I’m going to be speaking at the CodeCamp in Krakow, Poland, on October 17th. Looks like a very cool event with a great speaker lineup, and best of all it’s free! So if you are in Poland around that time, I suggest you drop by and say hi – you can learn stuff about F# from me, incidentally, and of course I’m always happy to meet DevExpress customers and talk about our products.

Hope to see you there!

I was in Amsterdam yesterday and did a talk for the dotNed user group on functional programming in C#. It’s always a great topic to talk about, and as usual everybody was very interested. We spent a bit more time on the Parallel Extensions than I was anticipating – the main reason I even start explaining Parallel Extensions is that I want to point out where their functionality ends – but that was fine. I think I was able to answer a bunch of questions on that, which is always a good thing.

A few of the guys were very happy about DevExpress and didn’t hesitate to say so either :-) (And no, this doesn’t mean that everybody else was horribly unhappy about DevExpress, the “others” just didn’t say anything on the topic. :-)) Especially the Windows Forms controls were mentioned as being fantastically stable and feature rich, with brilliant documentation. Always nice to hear that!

Thanks to all the great people in Amsterdam for having me there!

My friend John recently asked me about a visual element for his web site here. It was supposed to look like a scroller sort of thingy that should show stuff. Brilliant, eh? I couldn’t readily come up with a suggestion that would satisfy all those requirements, so I looked into creating something for him. Of course, being the cheap bastard that I am, I wanted to use Flash for this (oh sure, there’s Silverlight, but it always appears to be out of date on my own machine, and I’m afraid its market penetration doesn’t seem to really cut it right now for simple boring animated stuff on web sites…) but not pay for any tools.

I tried a bunch of different things with varying success. As is often the case with free and open source software (not the big projects of course, but the small stuff), some programs are really only made to be used by the guy who wrote them in the first place, since they lack any useful form of documentation.

Anyway, the thing I found to be working pretty well is a library called Ming. I’m sure that from a Flash guru’s perspective it is rather restrictive, but at least it works. The docs aren’t generally fantastic, but there are language bindings for PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and I think a few others, and some of these have their own documentation. So if you’re able to read code samples in any or all of these languages, you can find quite a lot of information and piece things together. I decided to use Ruby, just for the fun of it, and did this brilliant scroller that you can now see in action on John’s page. Try it yourself, it’s fun!