Phil Trelford's Blog

Silverlight has become increasingly popular for applications that run both in-browser and on the desktop like Sky’s Go and Netflix. One of the key new features in Silverlight 5 is multiple window support for desktop applications (also known as Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications). Why Multiple...

A ChildWindow in Silverlight is a control that can be displayed over a parent window blocking its interaction. Silverlight 5 introduces multiple window support for Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications with elevated trust. Unfortunately the ChildWindow control is not currently multi-window aware...

Silverlight 5 provides multi-window support for Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications with elevated trust. Unfortunately the ContextMenu provided in the December 2011 release of the Silverlight Toolkit is not multi-window aware which means that context menu’s opened from secondary windows only appear...

It’s a bit of a long story. A chain of events would unfurl that would lead me inextricably to writing a clone of a 70s video game. It started a few weeks ago while exploring early 90s dance tracks on Spotify, when I happened upon the seminal EP - Clonks Coming by the Sweet Exorcist. Later a lack...

The F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group will be starting 2012 with a code Kata on Thursday January 26th at 6:30pm at Skills Matter.   Kata The term Kata comes from martial arts. A code Kata is a short programming exercise for practicing an aspect of software development. Back in November...

I’ve spent the last 2-days of this week on a hands on TDD & Refactoring workshop ran by Jason Gorman. The course comprises of short exercises that you tackle in pairs. The provided machines came with Visual Studio 2010 installed so for most of the exercises my programming pair, Martin Trojer...

A few weeks back I built a simple console application with my 9yo using F# for practicing the times tables. So that he could share the game with his friends at school I followed Attwood’s law and created a JavaScript version. However I wasn’t particularly satisfied with this JavaScript...

JavaScript is the old new thing. First shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995, JavaScript is supported by most popular browsers. Because of this, JavaScript has become an intermediate language for other languages to target. CoffeeScript (late 2009) and ClojureScript (2011) are relatively...

Last week’s 2-track Progressive F# Tutorials conference seemS to have gone pretty well: Possibly the best Skills Matter event I have attended You can see pictures from the event over on the Skills Matter Flickr stream: Skills Matter also have Videos Podcasts of all the sessions...

The Reactive Extensions (Rx) provide LINQ style querying capabilities for events in C#, VB.Net and JavaScript. Rx implements extension methods over IObservable<T>, just as LINQ to Objects provides a set of extension methods over IEnumerable<T>, There has been a fair amount of...

FP Day saw talks from luminaries in the Functional Programming world, Simon Peyton-Jones and Don Syme give key notes, with hands-on tutorials and experience reports on F#, Clojure and Haskell sandwiched in the middle. Tomas Petricek and I provided the F# filling, and Zach Bray applied the F#...

As part of his maths homework my eldest has to practice the times table under the clock to improve times. This looked like a good opportunity to combine maths homework with some programming. Over about half an hour and 43 lines of code we came up with a Times Table game as an F# console...

Over time I’ve been trying to engage my young children with computer programming, so far we’ve looked at Squeak, Small Basic and more recently F#. They really enjoyed playing with the Turtle in Small Basic, an idea that comes from Logo, a programming language I myself played with as a child. ...

This weekend I flew into Belfast for their Developer Developer Developer (DDD)  conference. The DDD conferences are run by the developer community for the developer community, where sessions are voted on prior to the conference. I highly recommend these free events, there always seems to be...

Last week Jon Harrop showed me some interesting data access code (Jon and I often share the same Cambridge to London train). The code used pattern matching to match records returned from a SQL command, for example.: let values = [for index in 0..reader.FieldCount-1 -> reader.GetValue index]...

Back in September 2008, Scott Hanselman ran a piece entitled the Rise of F#. The following year, in October 2009, Somesegar announced the release of F# in VS 2010. April 2010 saw F# 2.0 ship with VS2010. 6 months on F# goes open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Last month, F# entered the...

Following on from last week’s What makes a good feature file article, this week it’s time to tackle what makes a good step definition. To automatically test that the our applications behaviour matches that defined by the scenarios in a feature file, a mapping is required. Step definitions provide...

Back in March, Gojko Adzic and David De Florinier ran an illuminating interactive session at the excellent Cukeup! conference entitled What makes a good feature file. A feature file is a file containing a set of scenarios specified in Gherkin for consumption by Cucumber or a derivative thereof....

This month F# became the first functional programming language to hit the top 20 of the TIOBE Programming Community Index: The recent rise in popularity of F# comes as no surprise. Apart from being a nicely designed language, F# is available in the latest version of Microsoft's Visual Studio ...

It’s coming up to the first anniversary for TickSpec, a library and framework designed to support Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). The first check-in was on the 30th August 2010: Barebones BDD framework that supports a subset of the Gherkin language (Given,When,Then). Since then...