Computer science is a relatively young discipline but it is based on logic and a good design is based on mathematical theories even if that's not immediately obvious while developing it. Some languages are based entirely on mathematical ideas, SQL is based entirely on set theory, but ultimately
A few years ago (I know, I really should update this blog more often) I asked WTF is...a computation expression. Well, I'm happy to say in the meantime I discovered a great use for one that's reusable, and have finally released it as a library.
So now that Twitter has been sold and is already in trouble, with dropping ad revenue, mass layoffs, and the prospect of accounts previously banned for hate-speech returning, it's no surprise that a lot of people are looking to move to other platforms. Enter Mastodon, a decentralised platform
Announcing the first alpha release of F# support for Entity Framework Core 5.0.3
How to not have to go through multi-factor authentication every time you open Azure Storage Explorer
...and why should I care? Every time computation expressions in F# are discussed it's only a matter of time before the dreaded M-word is mentioned. So let's get it out of the way early.... Monad Right, that's that done and let's not
I've written before about developing software in Docker containers and while that has been a step forward for development and being able to isolate development environments, the strength of Docker has always been in running applications without having to worry about requirements or dependencies. For managing clusters of
I'm writing this up for two reasons, one is that I can find this again next time it happens. The second is simple but important, we all make mistakes and at times they can seem pretty obvious in retrospect. But it's important to share the stories
We've all heard of unit testing and some of us have even been known to practice it. It has a simple premise * Have a method or some other "unit" of code you want to test * Pass in some contrived test data * Compare the result to what
Setting up a new project can be a pain. Especially if you want to split it into separate folders for clarity. You might want a src folder for the project itself, a test folder for the unit and integration tests, a docs folder for documentation. You are writing documentation for
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a .NET project in possession of multiple time zones, must be in want of Noda Time. Sometimes though, we have an existing project where it's just not reasonable to move everything over and we need a way to display a DateTime
Back in the good old days, C# was .NET was Windows. Sure there were antique languages like VB.NET and ivory tower academia from F# but real developers used C# and the language was just fine as it was. Sure, some additions helped, generics were ok even if they did
.NET Core
Since the beginning of time .NET Core there has been one continuous annoyance about developing cross-platform solutions, including build scripts for windows and non-windows platforms. We have at least fallen into a standard pattern, most repositories will contain both a build.cmd and build.sh that will build the project
Docker
Ah, a new open source project that looks interesting. Let's pull it down from GitHub, open it up in the IDE of our choice and.... Oh... It turns out the build scripts assume you have some build tool already installed or, even worse, a specific version of it.
JavaScript
.NET Core
Publishing a .NET Core application as a single executable file, and keeping it as small as possible
F#
Recently I decided to implement a chess engine as a way to explore building a rules engine in F# GitHub link: https://github.com/simon-reynolds/FsChess F# was my choice of language as it has a number of advantages. For instance, defining the pieces is a lot simpler thanks to
Continuous Integration
When npm install is taking too long on your build server, npm ci may be jut the command you need
Git
Fetch pending changes for all git repositories in a directory using PowerShell
C#
One of biggest trends in the last few years is functional programming, once again proving that fashion goes in circles. Immutability is a central tenet of functional programming, the idea is that variables are not variable, once an object is created it does not change. If you need to modify
F#
While porting some C# to F# recently I got sick of rewriting ternary operators like this var result = condition ? "True Branch" : "False Branch"; into a form like this let result = if condition then "True Branch" else "False Branch" or let result = match
JavaScript
You've got some javascript you want to refactor so you open Visual Studio Code and get cracking. But since you've decided to write it in plain javascript it's an untyped mess. You look at that property you just renamed, are you sure you found
Entity Framework
Updating Nuget packages should be simple. Sometimes you get version errors or a TargetInvocationException at runtime for no clear reason
Git
GitHub has a lot of neat features but this has to be my new favourite one. If you're looking at a pull request, example at https://github.com/simon-reynolds/url-magic/pull/1 you can quickly view the diff by going to https://github.com/simon-reynolds/url-magic/pull/1.