Taggart Software Consulting - Cameron Taggart

I now use Google Chrome to view .pdf files instead of Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader). The Chome PDF Viewer plugin (chrome://plugins) has been shipping with Chrome since version 8 2010-12. Using Chrome to view .pdf files has several advantage over Adobe Reader: Chrome loads the ...

I just launched Windows Live Writer on my Windows 7 64-bit PC and it told me an update was available. While trying to run the update, it failed with this error: It looks like another program is preventing the installer from working.Error: 0x80070643Source: wllogin-amd64 I reran the installer a...

Microsoft’s WCF Data Services TEAM announced a new JavaScript library for OData in February. The documentation for the new library gives several code snippet examples, but doesn’t provide live examples. Here is a live example that gets all the genres in the Netflix catalog. The source code is...

I am currently taking Spanish classes. The easiest way I’ve found to type in Spanish is to add “Spanish” as an input language for your keyboard in Windows. Once you add “Spanish” as an input language, the Language Bar allows you to easily switch between the languages. Here is a screenshot that...

Asynchronous programming in F# is almost as easy as programming synchronously. It is a compelling reason to use F# rather than another language like C#, which will not have an easy asynchronous model until C# 5.0. Below, I show how communicate to a device over a serial port both ways. The...

Jon Harrop posted an impressive solution yesterday for “Visualizing a complete graph” using F# Interactive in 10 lines of code. I created a F# Silverlight project that uses that code to display a complete graph in Silverlight. I added a slider control, allowing you to move between 3 vertices and...

It is possible to create and debug Silverlight applications using the free Visual Studio 2010 Shell (integrated mode) + F# 2.0 Free Tools + Silverlight 4 Tools. To demonstrate this, I translated the C# and XAML in my previous post  into F#: namespace AreaConverter2...

I updated Cristian Merighi (Ryoushin)’s F# Silverlight demo to build and run with Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4. See his original 2009-07 blog post titled “Silverlight and F# happily ever after” for more details. His original code, my changes, and a working solution are available here....

Last month, Rey Dacoco began a series titles “Visual F# 100 Examples”. He posted Example Number 1 on 2010-10-18. I copied his code into a new Mercurial repository, revised it, then coded a Silverlight version. “Problem: Make a windows form application that will ask the user’s mental age and...

Do not upgrade to VS 2010 if you use C++/CLI. I rolled back to using VS 2008 SP1 after I tried to use VS 2010 without IntelliSense. It completely kills my productivity to code without IntelliSense. If you also find this frustrating, please vote and/or leave a comment here. For a variety of...

iTunes provides a documented COM API that can easily be used from .NET. You can do lots of cool stuff using F# Interactive, especially if you add some F# extension properties to their provided classes (see iTunesExt.fs). You can checkout the Visual Studio 2010 solution.  The below code is...

Wanting to be able to play my music from my computer on my Xbox 360, I installed Microsoft’s Zune Software available for free at www.zune.net. You can configure the Zune Software to setup a Zune Network Sharing Service (NSS) for the Xbox 360. I like the music experience on the Xbox 360 though the...

Mono.Security can be used to check for the presence of an Authenticode signature on a assembly. On my system, only one assembly isn’t signed in the .NET 4 GAC. The other 364 of 365 are signed. In the .NET 2 GAC, 936 are signed while 1269 are not. In Windows Explorer, you can see the details on...

Mono.Cecil can be used to look inside assemblies. May be you want to search GAC to find types that implement a certain interface. In this post, I’ll show how to find all the types that implement IDisposable as an example. The output of this code on my machine: There are 1620 DLLs in C:\Windows...

The Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) that comes with Microsoft Windows is a data storage technology that is a good match for F# and domains like technical computing.  ESE has a really impressive set of features [1] [2].  I like that it provides a “highly concurrent database access”, can...

Scott Seely just posted how “F# is Changing My Style”.  He gave example code of how he now approaches coding in C# in a more functional way.  The code uses LINQ to print a list of WCF binding that have a default constructor and support transactions.  I think it actually is a...

I updated “funslae” to center the map on your location if Google can figure out your location.  The Google AJAX API is used to get your location based on your IP address.  There are many other options for geocoding an IP address.  The updated example demonstrates how to communicate...

The Bing Maps Silverlight Control was released in November.  You can get a Bing Maps account and the Silverlight Interactive SDK at http://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/.  I’ve committed code for this blog that shows you how to get started with it using an F# Silverlight application...

I have a lot of experience building web applications, but I haven’t had the opportunity yet to play much with Silverlight, Scala, or App Engine.  I hope to try out the technologies in a series of blog posts and get feedback and input from the community.  I just uploaded the first...

Qt, available at qt.nokia.com, is another popular toolkit that can be used to build cross-platform user interfaces.  Since Qt 4.5, released in 2009-03, it is available in the more commercial friendly LPGL. Previously, the open source edition was under GPL.  The best solution for using...