When to Unit Test in F#

Note: This article has been excerpted from my upcoming book, Get Programming with F#. It provides an overview of different “levels” of unit testing, and how and where they’re appropriate in F#. We’ll also discuss different forms of unit testing practices, including test driven development (TDD), and finally see how to write simple unit tests …

Introducing Type Providers

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

Modelling State in F#

This article has been excerpted from Learn F# Working with mutable data Working with mutable data structures in the OO world follows a simple model — you create an object, and then modify its state through operations on that object. What’s tricky about this model is that it can be hard to reason about your code. Calling a …

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 …

Hosting Suave in the Azure App Service

In my previous post, I spoke about the deployment aspects of the Azure App Service, and how in conjunction with Kudu, F# and FAKE, we can utilise a SCM-based solution for deployment that can essentially follow the exact same build process as is performed locally. In this post I want to discuss the process behind …

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 …

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 …