F# and accelerator

My colleague, Satnam, has just set up a blog and posted a neat article about using v2 of Accelerator with F#.

Mozilla>>Bing

Here's an email I wouldn't have expected to see.

.720

Reading some fluff about what the "Xbox 720" might look like reminded me that I've resurrected the great-great-...-great-grandfather of the DS recently. When I was last at my mother's house I found my old Pocket Scramble handheld in a cupboard. Finally I got round to getting hold of some LR44 batteries and, hey presto, it's working again:Many happy memories associated with this game. I remember I also used it as my alarm clock:-)

Trip Report #3

One of things everyone does when visiting the mothership is go to the Company Store. On top of copies of software and books, there's also various Microsoft branded merchandise. (My manager has the Microsoft "Brain in a Petri Dish" in his office:-))

Most exciting for me was the opportunity to play with a Zune HD. I was completely blown away. It is a fantastic device. Clearly it's up against the iPod Touch, but for me it is a clear winner. Its UI is nicer (in fact more than this, I think it's a revolution in UI design), the screen is vastly superior, and it's wonderful to play with a Windows device with a multi-touch screen!

There's only one question: Why can't I buy it in Europe? I wish I had an answer to this:-(

Tiger

There was a lot of TV coverage of the Tiger Woods "story" when I was in the States last week. None of them were as good as this from Taiwan.

Trip report #2

I'm just wrapping up another wonderful visit to the mothership. In the spirit of the recent Thanksgiving, I have to say that I'm very privileged to have Mads and Erik as colleagues. We really thrashed out lots of details of our paper, so now what remains is the writing around the details. It's going to be tough but I'm optimistic.

Moreover, we have lots of new ideas to push on. Much of 2010 is now sorted I suspect :-)

23 June 2010

..is clearly going to be a difficult day in our house. (here)

Trip report #1

So far I'm having a great visit. The fact that I missed a day seems to be balanced by the fact that I'm currently awake by 5am every morning :-(

Yesterday, I think (hope) we made the finishing touches to the technical detail of our C# 4.0 paper. Now we have a big rush to write all the surrounding text. I anticipate a lot of typing on the flight home!

I went to a talk by Manuel on Code Contracts, which is the coolest stuff. If you are a C# developer you should download this package and play. It allows you to write pre- and post-conditions in your code and use them to generate runtime tests, do compile-time verification, and generate documentation. It's very nice. Moreover, this extension is through a library, so it really is the C# compiler that you know and love. Totally awesome. (Although I have some ideas to discuss with Matt when I get back about how to make it even better!)

Last night, I had a great meal with Nik at Trellis in Kirkland. I had the steak which was spectacularly good, although I would have served some potatoes amongst the other root vegetables. But the meat was divine.