For not having another Jabuka post yet… Well, I’ve been really busy at my previous employers getting upto speed on various new technologies, then as you may have read on my other blog, I’ve been busy preparing for a new job (I might blog a bit about that at some point), and work always takes priority. I did have to create an interesting small WPF 3D application as part of my application process (I’ll tart this up and get it online when I get chance).
I haven’t given up on Jabuka, I spent a lot of time over Christmas researching different constraint methods (LCP solvers, PGS solvers and Sequential Impulses), and will playing around with this as soon as I get a chance to breathe (oh, and I finally packaged up my NUnit data-driven testing extension, here).
Otherwise, my new years resolution is to play with F# - I attended a Next Gen Usergroup talk last year at Microsoft’s Cambridge site by Don Syme. Since then I’ve had time to do some reading around, but not to actually create anything in anger. Obviously, some functional ideas have influenced C# (lambda expressions etc.) but I want to see how working in a functional mindset might chance some of my ideas of designing code.
There’s been lots of blogging recently on immutability in C# (see here and here) recently - in functional languages everything is immutable, and obviously not having immutable state gets around guarding state with multiple threads, it’s just the overall program design I can’t picture yet (I’m used to thinking of looking for common interfaces, design patterns etc.) There’s also new parallel/Concurrent resources available from Microsoft which do fit nicely into all this (see F#’s asynchronous workflows).