This last weekend I participated in the "Hack for the Sea" hackathon. As part of that, I needed to store images and structured data to Azure Storage. The process is very straightforward using F#'s async capabilities.

First, you'll need the connection string for your Azure Storage:

Use that to …

fun-ny Faces : Face-based Augmented Reality with F# and the iPhone X

Each year, the F# programming community creates an advent calendar of blog posts, coordinated by Sergey Tihon on his blog. This is my attempt to battle Impostor Syndrome and share something that might be of interest to the community …

Rumor has it that Apple will support the Apple Pencil in the forthcoming iPad. If so, more developers will want to use the new features of UITouch -- force, angle, and elevation -- supported by the incredibly-precise stylus.

Basically, it's trivial:

-- Force is UITouch.Force;
-- Angle is UITouch.GetAzimuthAngle(UIView); and
-- Angle …

I am publicly committing to developing “TideMonkey,” a tide-prediction application that will run on (at least) iOS and watchOS.

TideMonkey will be based on Xtide, an excellent piece of software developed by David Flater. At the moment, my hope is that it will be a very loose port, or what …

Disclaimer: This is just a hack. I’m not in any position to make announcements about stuff, but Xamarin loves F# and I’m sure that better solutions than this are forthcoming. But this was fun to get running, so…

Xamarin just released it’s Preview of Watch Kit support …

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-v4jdQJ5Wo&feature=youtu.be&a[/embed]

Video from my Xamarin Evolve talk on using F# for programming mobile apps, in which I argue that functional and object-oriented programming are two great paradigms that pair great together.

Things are kind of busy what with Evolve being only 40 days away and iOS 8 coming down the pipe, but I thought I'd share the easy hack that allows you to program Xamarin.Forms with F#.

(Of course, Xamarin loves F# and official support and templates and documentation and …

It's F# Week at Xamarin. Also, in the US, it's only a 4-day work-week. F# saves 20% of your time. QED.

Anyway, I don't have any actually interesting F# to share, but I recommend:

• Mike Bluestein's Scene Kit in F# demo, and
• Frank Kreuger's awesome demo of using F# interactively …

I have the best job in the world:

[code lang="fsharp"]
namespace SceneKitFSharp

open System
open MonoTouch.UIKit
open MonoTouch.Foundation
open MonoTouch.SceneKit
open MonoTouch.CoreAnimation

type MySceneKitController () =
inherit UIViewController()

override this.ViewDidLoad () =
let scene = new SCNScene ()

//Positions everyone!
let boxNode = new SCNNode ()
boxNode.Geometry \<- new SCNBox(
Width = 1 …

I think BASIC's greatest strength may be that it was something that many people -- not just those with a particular background -- could learn. There was no gatekeeper, either literally or figuratively: you didn't have to push punchcards under a bank-teller window nor did you have to learn recursion before learning …