Well, we’re a few days into 2012 and no armageddon yet, so it’s probably safe to take a quick glance back over our shoulder at some of the technical stuff that’s flashed past in the preceding 12 months.
Continue reading Looking back at 2011
Tag Archives: Visual Studio
C++: The oldest new kid on the block
Nobody could have failed to notice the recent resurgence of interest in the C++ programming language. In particular, the recent Build conference was the most we’ve seen Microsoft talking about C++ for several years. Why has a language that’s been languishing in the “prehistoric irrelevance” category for so long suddenly come back into vogue?
Continue reading C++: The oldest new kid on the block
Calling MSBuild tasks with F#
The other day I was trying to understand some strange behaviour in msbuild with regard to how it resolves referenced assemblies. I thought I’d try directly invoking the tasks that are used during the build, specifically ResolveAssemblyReference, so that I could experiment with them in F# interactive. It turned out to be pretty straightforward.
Continue reading Calling MSBuild tasks with F#
Generating and plotting random numbers
For a while now I’ve been planning to write a blog post about pricing financial instruments using Monte Carlo techniques in F#. As part of this I needed to generate normally distributed random numbers, and while putting together the code to do it I realised it was interesting enough to warrant its own post.
I’m making use of a few F#/.NET idioms to make the process easier. For instance, sequences (.NET’s IEnumerable) are used as the source of uniformly distributed random numbers. Also, to verify that the resulting numbers are actually normally distributed, we can easily use existing WPF/silverlight controls to visualise the values direct from within Visual Studio, in a manner similar to this previous post – but without having to write the plotting code ourselves.
Continue reading Generating and plotting random numbers
Pinned DataTips in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
I’ve just noticed a nice little feature in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2: pinned DataTips. Values displayed in the debugger as you hover over a variable can now be pinned in place and remain aligned with the source. They can even have annotations added… Tasty!
Installing Windows SDK breaks F# Visual Studio integration
Beware! If you install the Windows SDK – perhaps to get access to the interesting looking WPF performance tools – you’ll find that it hoses your F# Visual Studio integration. I found that it causes intellisense tooltips to stop appearing, and the integrated F# interactive to crash Visual Studio. Both of these issues are a real pain; especially the inability to see the inferred types “live”, which is pretty much essential for F# development – where the focus is on compile time correctness.
I remembered seeing a post on that Windows SDK blog that I’d come across relating to a similar issue with the XAML editor (I’ve been doing some work with WPF recently, more on that in a later post) so thought I’d try the steps they recommend, in short, re-registering TextMgrP.dll:
regsvr32 "%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv\TextMgrP.dll"
…and all my problems went away. Hope you find this useful.
Visual Studio Toggle Brackets Macro
After using a F# heavily for a while, I often found myself wanting to add brackets (or rather, parentheses) around some text. This is normally when adding a type specification to an argument in order to be able to use dot notation, e.g. going from:
let typeName t = t.Name
which causes “error FS0072: Lookup on object of indeterminate type based on information prior to this program point”, to the correct:
let typeName (t:Type) = t.Name
(These are obviously simplistic examples!)
So I broke out the Visual Studio macro editor for the first time in a while, and put together something to toggle brackets around the currently selected text. It’s naive, but, combined with Shift+Alt+Left Arrow to select the previous word, it’s effective:
Public Sub AddBrackets()
Dim s As Object = DTE.ActiveWindow.Selection()
If s.Text.StartsWith(“(“) And s.Text.EndsWith(“)”) Then
s.Text = s.Text.Substring(1, s.Text.Length – 2)
Else
s.Text = “(“ + s.Text + “)”
End If
End Sub
Copy this text into a module within your macro project, and assign a suitable keystroke using Tools|Customize|Keyboard.