Pattern matching in action using C# 6

On year ago, on this very day, I wrote about the open-sourcing of C# 6.0. Thanks to a very special information leak, I learned about this about a week before Microsoft officially announced it. However, my information were slightly incorrect - rather then releasing the much improved version of the language, Microsoft continued working on language version internally called "Small C#", which is now available as "C# 6" in the Visual Studio 2015 preview.

It is my understanding that, with this release, Microsoft is secretly testing the reaction of the developer audience to some of the amazing features that F# developers loved and used for the last 7 years and that are coming to C# very soon. To avoid shock, these are however carefuly hidden!

In this blog post, I'm going to show you pattern matching which is probably the most useful hidden C# feature and its improvements in C# 6. For reasons that elude me, pattern matching in C# 6 is called exception filters and has some unfortunate restrictions. But we can still use it to write nice functional code!

Composing Chrismas with F#

This blog post is a part of the awesome F# Advent Calendar (see the previous entry about writing algorithms in F# from Rick Minerich), so it inevitably needs a Christmassy theme. However, there is also going to be a serious theme for the blog post, which is domain-specific languages.

One of my favorite examples of Domain-Specific Languages is a simple OpenGL library that I wrote some time ago for composing 3D graphics in F#. You can see it in my NDC 2014 talk Domain Specific Languages, the functional way and I also used it for Solving Puzzles with F# earlier on this blog.

The nice thing about the library is that it is very simple, but is rich enough to demonstrate all the important concepts. In fact, the library is so easy to use that even 8 years old can do a talk about it. So, if you're spending Christmas with your family, perhaps you can go through this article with your children!

BREAKING: Open-source C# 6.0 released

At last, the long wait is finally over! After 4 years of waiting, the fully managed implementation of the C# compiler codenamed "Roslyn" has been finally released. In the recent months, "Roslyn" has been slowly turning into vaporware, but thanks to the recent breakthrough, the team made an enormous progress over the last two months and even implemented a number of new C# 6.0 features.

The C# 6.0 compiler, together with the full source code has been released today!

UPDATE: In case you are reading this article later than on the day when it was published, let me just point out that this was released on 1 April 2014. Just to avoid any disappointments. Have fun ;-).

Solving fun puzzles with F#

Do you need to convince your friends & family that programming can be fun? For the last Christmas, I got a puzzle as a gift. It is a number of small cubes, joined together, that can be rotated and folded to form a bigger (4x4x4) cube.

We spent the last few days of the year with family and a couple of friends and I left the puzzle on the table. Every time I walked around, someone was playing with it without much success. In the end, I said that if noone solves it until 31 December, I'll write a program to do it. Which I did between 7 PM and 8 PM and, voilà, here is what I got...

So, how do you solve a puzzle in about 1 hour on New Year's eve?

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