Many WPF applications need to handle a very large data collections – maybe the users really need a million rows in their GridView control. The way we cope with this is to ‘virtualize’ the data, and have it available to your control on an ‘as needed’ basis. Most list controls in WPF (including the standard ListView/GridView) include the concept of a ‘viewport’ under the hood. A viewport is a virtual ‘window’ on the underlying data collection, which only requires the data currently being displaye... [More]

I’ve been playing a lot with F# lately, particularly in the area of financial option modelling, which requires quite a lot of number crunching – a perfect scenario for tinkering around in F# interactive. However, I need to get data out of my data store, and use it to create collections of records, that represent the data that I need. This was becoming a little cumbersome, so I thought I’d create a little ORM function to do the trick open System.Data.SqlClient open Microsoft.... [More]

For many years, OOP abstractions and design patterns have been the cornerstones of my development methodology as a senior C# developer in investment banking. However, over the last year or so I have taken quite a shine to Microsoft’s new FP language (F#), not just because purely functional program code is concise powerful and elegant, but because the eclectic mix of functional and OOP paradigms in F# enable me to develop better, faster, stronger and more maintainable applications. In investmen... [More]