Introducing Type Providers

This article has been excerpted from my upcoming book, Learn F# . Save 37% off with code fccabraham

Learn F# for the masses

Anyone who reads my blog will have observed that I've not posted anything for several months now. In addition to my moving country and trying to build a company in 2016, I've also been writing a book. I'm delighted to now share that Learn F# is now available on Manning's MEAP program - hopefully the …

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 …

On Type Inference

This is a comment I recently saw on a headline-grabbing article about Swift: - I also don't think that "type inferring" is of great use. If you cannot be bothered to hack in a variable's data type, maybe you should not develop software in the first place. I was so infuriated by this comment that …

Pattern Matching in C#?

As C# 6 previews have come out, I was not surprised to see pattern matching absent in the feature set. It's a shame but I can understand why it's not included - it's far more powerful than switch/case but with both in the language, it'd probably be difficult to make the two work together without …

Trying F# – are you a developer or a mouse?

Since starting to deliver my "Power of F#" talk to user groups and companies (generally well received - I hope), and getting involved in a few twitter debates on F#, I've noticed a few common themes regarding why .NET teams aren't considering trying out F# to add to their development stack. Part of this is the usual spiel of …

A refresher on Async

A bit late in the day, but here's a quick-and-simple demonstration of the fundamental difference between single-threaded, multi-threaded and asynchronous coding patterns. To illustrate this, here's a simple task that you've no doubt seen a million times before - download a number of resources over HTTP. The code for this demo is available in both …

Lightweight callsite caching with F# and C#

What is Memoization? Just a simple demo outlining how you might write a simple generic callsite cache in F# aka Memoize. This is something that you can find elsewhere on the web - it's easy to write one. What I really want to illustrate is if you were to write something similar in C# how …

The future of C#

Having recently discussed (and effectively ruled out) JavaScript as a valid programming language on the server, I wanted to review the current situation for C#, how it has changed in the past few years and my thoughts on where I see it going as a server-side language. Java and C# I want to start by …