Deploying Azure web applications with FAKE

The Azure App Service is a great service that makes hosting web-facing applications extremely easy, with support for many value adds out of the box e.g. scale out, A/B testing and authentication are all included. I've recently been looking at how you can use this service within the context of some F# frameworks and libraries …

Working with running totals in F#

This post is an expanded version of February's F# Gazette. A common issue that developers that come from an OO background struggle with is how to effectively create accumulations over sequences of data without resorting to mutable state in an effective and succinct style. Let’s start with a fictional set of results for a sports …

Running F# on Microsoft Azure

As we keep seeing the same questions on Twitter (or elsewhere) regarding how to run F# applications on Azure, someone suggested to me that I write a post that outlines what your options are, and when and where you should use one service or the other. .NET on Azure Azure has always had a good …

Visual Studio Team Services and FAKE

What is VSTS? Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is Microsoft's cloud-based source control / CI build / work item tracking system (with a nice visual task board). It's a platform that is evolving relatively quickly, with lots of new features being added all the time. It also comes with a number of plans including a …

F#, .NET and the Open Source situation

If you read my (generally sporadic) blog postings, you'll know that in general I write about either F# and / or Azure, usually from a programmatic point-of-view. How easy is it to reason about a certain thing? How quickly can we make use of some Azure service from F#? And so on. In this post, …

What on earth has happened to NuGet?

After several months away from NuGet, I had to use it again recently in VS2015. I'm completely and utterly gobsmacked at how poor the current experience is. It's confusing, inconsistent and hard to use. Worse than that, it enables workflows that should never, ever be permitted within a package management system. First experiences with the …

MBrace, CloudFlows and FSharp.Data – data analysis made easy

In case you've not seen it before, MBrace is a simple programming model for scalable cloud data scripting and programming with .NET. It's written in F#, but has growing support for C# and VB .NET. Over the past year or so, I worked closely with the MBrace team to help get it working smoothly on …

Stateless services on Azure Service Fabric in F#

In my previous posts, I discussed the use of the Service Fabric (SF) actor framework (which is loosely based on Orleans) and F#, and how we can use FP features within an actor model, even one designed for OO languages. Exposing Services with Service Fabric Ironically, the actor framework with SF is one of its …

Building Azure Service Fabric Actors with F# – Part 2

In Part 1, I provided an overview of what Service Fabric (SF) is, and provided some step-by-step guidance on how to get up and running with the Service Fabric local installation. In this post, I want to move from the infrastructure to the code, and show how we can use F# with an Actor model …

Building Azure Service Fabric Actors with F# – Part 1

This post is the first part of a brief overview of Service Fabric and how we can model Service Fabric Actors in F#. Part 1 will cover the details of how to get up and running in SF, whilst Part 2 will look at the challenges and solutions to modelling stateful actors in a OO-based …