Coding

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coding•7 August 2012

Fantasy Football League Team Selector 2012-13

UPDATED VERSION: Fantasy Football Team Selector 2013-14 It's that exciting time of year again. I know, I know, London 2012 and all that but who really wants to watch amateur archers and beginner judo students when the English Premier League is about to restart? For those who weren't here last year, I announced in an overly technical way an area of artificial intelligence called constraint programming. Never mind all that though: here is an Excel spreadsheet that will help you improve your Fantasy Football League team for the Official Premier League version. EDIT: I've also added a Yahoo! version but...

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coding•12 July 2012

Modular WPF Interfaces

Imagine a completely modularised approach to designing user interfaces. For instance, say you design a user interface with one or more bits left blank. You give said blank regions a name and rely on someone else to provide a DLL that populates that part of the window with something shiny and functional. The keener among you will be aware that this functionality has already been in existance for quite some time now. Indeed, I've just described every Firefox plug-in ever written. But the modular approach to user interface design is one every application should have, not just customisable systems with...

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coding•19 October 2011

Caveats on actually using async and await

With the next release of .Net making a big push for parallelism-for-everyone-made-easy, I thought I'd take this opportunity to see if it really is as simple as they say. The most recent issue of the MSDN magazine has three articles regarding the changes to the Clanguage and what goes on under the hood when the programmer uses the new async and await keywords. This article looks at the challenges I faced in modifying an existing codebase to take advantage of the new functionality. .Net 4.5 Asynchronicity 101 I'll cut through some of the Microsoft boiler plate that builds up as...

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coding•17 October 2011

Simple WPF IronPython Application

A project I recently started working on required me to install Python on my development environment - something I've not relished doing in the past. But with previous restrictions relaxed I was able to pick whichever version of Python I liked so I chose the .Net implementation: IronPython. Here's how I got on... Many developers love Python and one of the reasons given by most who do is that the formatting is nice. I disagree. I miss the closing curly brackets that clearly separate one class, one function from another. My most common keystroke in Visual Studio is probably <Ctrl>+K,...

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