Granville Barnett

I’m an MVP! Thanks Microsoft!

2008-07-01T16:57:30Z

ASP/ASP.NET

I’m very happy to have received this award, hopefully my work in the future will receive the same welcome it has done in the past for the various sites, magazines, and projects I have contributed to!

Thank you to the MVP lead as well, Victoria Collins!

Granville

Visualizing data (plotting functions of two independent variables)

2008-06-22T11:37:38Z

First off this post doesn’t contain that much textual substance, for more read the previous post I made, also the graphing library I am using is F# for Visualization.

While it is possible to plot these functions by hand in the very, very (emphasis on very, e.g. a plane) simple cases anything other than that almost certainly requires some form of professional mathematical package, or in this case a plotting library.

I have only used F# for Visualization (now uses WPF not DirectX) on my home machine which is (briefly): 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, NVidia 7900 GS 256MB.

I found the performance of the 3D plotting really quite good.

Note: there is no point to the below graph, I just wanted to see if using somewhat over zealous input ranges would slow this thing down – it didn’t on my machine (well probably a few ms but nothing really noticeable).

I was curious…

…still was very fast to generate, however when I rotate the graph there is a very small pause (< 1s).

Note: you can also interact with these graphs with the mouse, so you can rotate them etc.

Having played with F# for Visualization quite a bit now I am starting to now use it all the time for this kind of thing rather than firing up something else like Octave, plus you get the added bonus of using F#!

Before I go I must remember that if I insert a few fairly large images in Live Writer then subsequent typing will be on a several second delay – so annoying!!!!

This MS Surface ad made me laugh

2008-06-17T18:21:22Z

http://on10.net/blogs/nic/Surface-Harrahs-iBar/

If you can’t be bothered watching the video the crux of the matter is this – a guy see’s a girl in the bar, throws a few messages her way as well as a drink (via Surface) then leaves the bar with her.

I must say its a very appealing way to attract the women out at night – what shocks me is that both were sober!

That ad just really made me laugh, I found it pretty tacky – I can imagine some people abusing the system by using some form of round-robin approach with sending messages to people, e.g. a guy just pings every table with women with various messages (yep – that’s right, they are playing the numbers game)!

I am writing this shaking my head in disbelief – do you really think that it would be that easy to attract women if there were Surface products everywhere?

Oh dear…

EDIT: I can actually envisage a time where people start suing for harassment in bars for receiving unwanted cheesy little messages sent via the trusty Surface product! …

Resharper 4 development moving fast now

2008-06-10T21:26:07Z

Last time I checked R# 4 was in Beta, just randomly browsed to the download page for the nightly builds and see that R# 4 is RC3.

I must say I am somewhat disappointed with JetBrains with regards to Resharper, we are several months past the release of Visual Studio 2008 and now only at this stage they are nearing release of R# 4 which has support for C# 3.0. It makes you question their commitment to .NET tooling.

For the most part I just use R# for getting rid of the grunt work, e.g. when using a TDD approach you can just add methods etc that don’t exist in types with the press of a few key’s.

My hope is that one day VS will ship with tooling that makes me not want to buy R#…looks like that day is a lonnnnnnng way off though.

Visualising data

2008-06-03T22:49:04Z

I tend to use Octave for maths based stuff, including visualizing the plotting of functions and so on. Anyway to my point, I have found that GNU Plot as great a tool it is to be somewhat linear in its way of thinking when rendering the (2D) graph - as an example if you devise a function with inputs that should produce (if by hand) a very nice curved plot then the chances are that GNU Plot will eradicate that expected curve and leave you with something very jagged.

Note: I'm not sure if there is an option somewhere in either Octave or GNU Plot to basically say "hey! throw the smooth curves in!!" so I apologise beforehand if such an option exists.

This has really started to annoy me this last week, so I started to think of alternatives to get a really nice visualisation stack that played nicely with one of the several languages that I am familiar with. As you will no doubt be aware in the past I have used (or at least tinkered with) NPlot, and ZedGraph and I can only tip my hat to the developers involved as they have created really great libraries there, oh and they are FREE! Both these frameworks are great, but they require a number of lines to actually get them setup correctly - even for trivial plotting. I wanted something that was quick and easy, and preferably something that worked well with functions - I started looking at F# alternatives...came across Flying Frogs F# for Visualization.

Last time I looked at FF's FS Vis (it's a mouthful so I'll cut it down!) it was based on directx, however I remembered reading somewhere that Jon had in fact ported it to WPF - this all sounded promising, WPF is a nice stack for graphing. I downloaded the bits, and literally with 1 line (and short) I can define the x and y range of values for the graph, and pump in a function to that plotting function and it will go ahead and use the x range as the independent values and go from there, excellent! ...but does it render super silky curves? yes! Beautiful! Although firing up VS to just do some visualising seems a little extreme it actually works well - the only tedious bit is referencing the assemblies required, once that has been done I found the workflow like that of any other mathematical environment - define the function(s), ranges and then invoke some plotting function. I've only played with the 2D plotting thus far - I just wanted to use it for some work I was doing, I am by no means totally clued up with what the graphing library can do.

Note: simple I know, not used this library for long - but the results seem to be pretty nice. There is some typesetting as well but I've yet to look at that in any real depth.

Interesting.

Note: I can't remember what Matlab produces - too pricey for me!

DSA 0.5 released!

2008-05-30T17:09:50Z

It's been a while, I've had to work on other stuff for the last 2 or so months which has rendered me with no time. That's the excuses out of the way...

Not much added in this release I would simply point you to the release page for more details.

A friend of mine Luca (translated to english) has joined the project now and will be helping to shape 0.6 and beyond - welcome Luca!!

Download DSA 0.5

Nasty bug rendered by installing MS Source Analysis for C#

2008-05-30T16:04:13Z

If you have installed the source analysis tool recently released by MS and have since tried to view the properties of a project then you will be greeted with the following error:

An error occurred trying to load the page.
COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used.

This is a very annoying bug, if you uninstall the tool all is fine.

They are aware of the issue.

Pex is released

2008-05-24T13:08:19Z

You wait ages for a bus and two of them come along at once (I'm referring to StyleCop as the other tool!).

Pex has been released which is a cool testing tool, best way to get up to speed is to view the screencast.

Unfortunately the installer only supports x86 so if like me you are running Vista x64 you will have to wait for a future version - they are working on this.

StyleCop becomes available to non-internal MS developers

2008-05-23T17:26:06Z

This is a great thing for MS to release to the developer community - StyleCop is a very interesting tool that was at least when I was there well known and highly thought of internally.

Read about it here, download it here.

Octave 3.01 out and runs a lot faster on Vista

2008-05-18T10:24:35Z

Just a quickie, and something I missed so excuse the old new by a few weeks but the folks over at Octave have released a primarily bug fix release.

Download here - http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html

Note: if you open Octave and then close the command line console that octave is open in using the window close icon the application will crash every time (or at least on Vista), to stop this you need to explicitly quit the application using the quit or exit command before closing the window.

DSA Recap

2008-05-08T22:42:40Z

Some of you will no doubt know that I started a project a while ago now that was intent on bringing implementations of various algorithms and data structures to .NET - but with a different take on things.

Well, after a recent detour with CPUSS (a project that analyses CPU scheduling algorithms - interesting project, give it a download!) in less than a week DSA will receive a lot of time again (next Thursday signals the end of a busy spell of work).

I wanted to thank the few hundred or so who have downloaded DSA 0.4 - you're participation itself is motivation. I have some news for DSA 0.6 that is interesting but I will save that for when DSA 0.5 is released.

I am looking for suggestions of things to add to DSA 1.0 (bare in mind that graphs are on the schedule) so if you can think of a pretty rare data structure or algorithm that you think would be nice to implement then please let me know as I can see whether or not (depending on time constraints) I can get it into DSA 1.0.

The plan is to hopefully release DSA 1.0 by the end of summer (think early September) so I am really expecting things to move quick from a weeks time.

Thank you to all those who have downloaded, there are some exciting things to come!

F# 1.9.4 released

2008-05-06T18:06:16Z

I missed this as I was doing a lot of work at the time (was release a few days back) as via Don's blog, and he has a post on it here.

I gave it a quick install this morning and this release still doesn't fix the VS 2008 integration with F# interactive, i.e. the add-in doesn't register itself correctly so you have to always enable the add-in manually which is really annoying. The reason I mention this is that I saw some improvements mentioned on Don's blog regarding this release, and I rather hoped that this would be one of them.

I did note that Don states that this release doesn't include any investment they have for the VS integration later down the line, but I would of thought that this issue would of been addressed.

Download F# 1.9.4

VS 2008 (or VS in general) and multi-monitor support

2008-05-01T22:31:31Z

I seem to remember this particular issue making some ground in terms of verbal noise a year or so ago (actually it was more like 3 years ago) and although I don't particularly find VS support for multi-monitors that bad (although dragging windows isn't that intuitive) it maybe the time to actually recognize a many monitor development scenario natively.

Most people I speak to use more than one monitor in their dev setup, and I imagine (I know) that people at MS do as well.

My question to folks out there - have you heard any rumblings about this that suggests, or at least hints that this is on the agenda of forthcoming versions of VS?

Actually does anyone know of an IDE (regardless of its target language) that actually supports natively multi-monitor features?

A great resource for F# - F# Journal

2008-04-27T15:01:24Z

I'm on a mission to ramp my F# posts up but before I do I just wanted to point out that Jon Harrop has being relentlessly posting some great articles in his F# Journal.

One of the things that I must give Jon great credit for is that he is very honest to the nature of functional programming - his articles are littered with great insight (if like me you are not one for reading code snippets, rather you just want the theory and then take that and run with it - F# Journal is very good for that...of course there are code snippets as well though).

The best thing though for me about F# Journal is that the articles are not on the typical subjects, rather they are quite varied and I must say very interesting, here are a few titles of recent articles in F# Journal:

Factoring numerical methods using combinators
Numerical Libraries: special functions, interpolation and random numbers
Reducing development costs with Static Typing
Numerical Libraries: linear algebra and spectral methods

Oh his blog is called F# News. Some more interesting stuff on there as well.

C++ portability guide

2008-04-20T18:16:17Z

I was looking for this document a while ago and couldn't seem to find it but I stumbled across it moments ago almost by chance. It's the the Mozilla guidance for C++ portability - give it a read here if you are interested in that stuff it is full of subtle pointers that make sense (and some that are not that obvious).

If you have a spare few minutes give it a read, it is fairly comprehensive but at the same time I would take some of it with a pinch of salt.