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Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

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Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#11

Post by edgyswingset »

it_learnses wrote: post #7
smithkl42 wrote: post #5

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

A web API is a great candidate. Or really, anything that needs to work well at scale.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#12

Post by tpetricek »

salimmadjd wrote: post #2

I'm probably the minority here, as I'm a visual thinker. But when I see "Visual" in the headline and click on it. The first thing I want to see is something visual (I understand it's a product name). But on this post, everything above the fold is just text which I don't want to read. I'm actually very curious about F# and anything functional these days, however, aesthetically was turned off for some reason. Show me y…

This is about community plugin for Visual Studio. You can find more on the project web site: http://fsprojects.github.io/VisualFSharpPowerTools/ Not sure this qualifies as visual, but they have lots of pictures of what the plugin can actually do :-).

If you want a visual introduction to F#, check out (shameless plug) www.fun3d.net

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#13

Post by tpetricek »

it_learnses wrote: post #7
smithkl42 wrote: post #5

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

This blog post might give you some good ideas: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/low-risk-ways-to-use-...

That said, people have used F# for pretty much everything - including data science and analytics, domain modelling (and business application development), testing (Canopy for web testing), build automation (check out FAKE and Paket). I guess you get the most value from F# by using it for some analytical component (implementing some logic), but the above blog post has many great ideas in other areas too.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#14

Post by mamcx »

smithkl42 wrote: post #5

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I drop the .NET ecosystem long time ago. F# make me look at it, and mostly, the opportunity to use it on OSX/Linux/iOS.

I'm uninterested in C#; so I'm trying to make the case for F# (and to be more brutal: And work good enough under OSX, because all my dev work is on it; plus looking to do iOS dev with F#: That is harder than I was expecting!).

I like the language, not as much as python/pascal but is great enough. I'm toying to build a compiler, and building some utils and porting (ie: experimenting ;) ) a massive obj-c project.

So far, my only gripe, is the extremely weak support for any other database that is not Sql Server. No F# native ORM work on OSX as-is. Sql Type-providers neither. You can make some basic stuff and crash faster after you try anything barely complex, like do a search ;)

I was forced to use NServiceKit (a clone of ServiceKit before go commercial) because was the one that I made to work, but then is made in C# and it break the expectations I was having with F# (like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31866227/why-im-getting-...)

So, that is my 5-cents: Expect pain outside VS/Sql Server, and I'm not fully convinced on the Web story neither (ie: Nothing as great + simple as django or flask on python)

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#15

Post by yareally »

mamcx wrote: post #14
smithkl42 wrote: post #5

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I drop the .NET ecosystem long time ago. F# make me look at it, and mostly, the opportunity to use it on OSX/Linux/iOS. I'm uninterested in C#; so I'm trying to make the case for F# (and to be more brutal: And work good enough under OSX, because all my dev work is on it; plus looking to do iOS dev with F#: That is harder than I was expecting!). I like the language, not as much as python/pascal but is great enough. I'…

> No F# native ORM work on OSX as-is. Sql Type-providers neither. You can make some basic stuff and crash faster after you try anything barely complex, like do a search ;)

There exists a very good ADO.net wrapper for F# called FsSQL

https://github.com/mausch/FsSql

Dapper can also be used with F#: https://gist.github.com/vbfox/1e9f42f6dcdd9efd6660

Neither are true ORM compared to say nHibernate, but both include mapping to .net collections. I generally prefer this approach over a true ORM for flexibility.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#16

Post by ZenoArrow »

edgyswingset wrote: post #11
it_learnses wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

A web API is a great candidate. Or really, anything that needs to work well at scale.

I agree a web API is a good project to start with. If anyone is thinking about trying this out, it's worth checking out Suave (worth noting that it's cross platform, works on Mac and Linux too):

http://blog.tamizhvendan.in/blog/2015/07/23/creating-mock-ap...

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#17

Post by Scuds »

it_learnses wrote: post #7
smithkl42 wrote: post #5

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

One thing though, you'll want to _really_ learn the type system and lean heavily upon it so that the compiler can guide you to build up your system.

It's the old adage of "Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won't usually need your [code]; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks

I'm digging this poker hands Kata

http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/43831/poker-ha...

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#19

Post by bargl »

JackMorgan wrote: post #9
it_learnses wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

Been using C# for a while now for shrinkwrapped winforms database application and web site. We started intermixing F# in the last year. I've found F# to be better than C# in everything except a few fringe cases where libraries have done things specific to C#. For example, F# has a better ORM framework than anything in C# with Type Providers.... unless you need to support two databases in the same dll. Then when tryin…

Oh man I don't know where you are working but it sounds like you have some really good leads/architects where you are at.

I like my current job, a LOT, but it isn't a development shop and they don't want to use F# because they are trying to limit the languages they support right now (Too many legacy apps). Which I understand, but at the same time I think we are really missing out.

Especially because they are developing the front end to be a very Functional Typescrip SPA. Anyway I've been learning F# in my spare time just for the heck of it.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#20

Post by MichaelGG »

lemming wrote: post #8

It's great that the community is stepping up to provide this functionality, but most of these features are things that I'm very surprised that the default tooling from MS doesn't already provide. No rename at all? No find references? I was led to believe that the VS tooling for F# was actually pretty good but those two are very basic things I expect from an IDE, especially for a static language.

MS simply doesn't invest in F# tooling like they do for C#. One reason is probably the user base, but that's a bit of a catch-22. The other likely reason is politics/saving face.
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