Would you believe it, I got a MacBook recently. It’s fantastic, there’s no other way to describe it. OS X is amazing, Windows apps seem to run faster in VMWare Fusion than they do on native Windows, and the applications are just… well, can’t find any more superlatives. Holy cow! I’ll certainly post more about this in the future. I’m not planning on abandoning Windows, or .NET, or anything like that — on the contrary, I want to see what other platforms have to offer these days, be it for comp …

I’m still in Orlando now, but later today I’ll be on a refreshing (?) flight back to the UK. TechEd was very good — lots of people very interested in DX products, we won loads of awards and had a good laugh about the Telerik guys ;-)

Later this week I’ll be in Reading for the NxtGenUG FEST 08 event on June 12th. Hate to state the obvious, but it’s the 2008 incarnation of their yearly FEST event. A day of great speakers and sessions, the usual (well, usual for NxtGenUG standards — if you’re n …

I’ve had a BA Executive Club account for about 18 months. During that time I must have been on perhaps 15 BA flights — some UK domestic, some within Europe, some to the US. For quite a while I’ve also had a BA-sponsored American Express card, which pays miles into my Executive Club account. I’m not flying on BA all the time, because I find that pretty hard to do — basically I wouldn’t pay extra to fly with a particular airline, and usually it’s hard enough to find flights that go to the right …

Editor’s note: In case you’re reading this in 2019, like I recently did, it should be pointed out that this opinion piece was written in the early days of F#. The language has since evolved in a variety of ways, which is not to say that the problems described below are necessarily solved today — but the position of F# in the landscape of .NET languages is now clearer than it was and I don’t agree anymore with the proposals I made in 2008.

In my continuing efforts to make XPO work fully wi …

The next problem I found in my efforts to make XPO work with F# is documented here: Null values for F# classes — basically, I can’t just set a variable that has a reference to another object to null in F#.

The general assumption in F# is that null values are a threat and so the languages discourages their use. I totally see the point and if all I wanted to do was create classes (or perhaps not even those) for use in F# itself, I wouldn’t have a problem with it — but interop is an important t …

Something I just stumbled upon. I was configuring Shorewall 4, and there’s a flag called DISABLE_IPV6 in shorewall.conf. Oh yeah, I thought, that makes sense — I don’t yes IPV6, so I’ll set that to Yes. Did so, and when I ran Shorewall it showed my lots of error messages like this:

FATAL: Module ip6_tables not found.
ip6tables v1.3.8: can't initialize ip6tables table `filter': iptables who? (do you need to insmod?)
Perhaps ip6tables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.

Well, …

I have been working on getting a sample for using XPO from F#. My first sample was easily created back in January this year:

#light
open DevExpress.Xpo
type Person = class
  inherit XPObject as base
  public new(session : Session) = { inherit XPObject(session);
    name = string.Empty
  }

  val mutable private name : string

  member public x.Name
    with get() = x.name
    and set(v) = x.name <- v
end

let person = new Person(XpoDefault.Session)
person.Name <- "Wally"
person.Save( ...

After my recent presentation at the VBUG conference, somebody sent me this question: “I have code to style a button and several triggers to change the button’s background color. For some reason, the trigger for the IsPressed property doesn’t seem to work. Why?” Here’s the style code that was being used (this actually includes some changes I made to the original, but never mind that):

<Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}">
  <Setter Property="Background" Value="Red"/>
  <Style.Triggers>
   ...