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
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
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.
Publishing a .NET Core application as a single executable file, and keeping it as small as possible
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.
I met a developer from an antique land Who said: 18 vast servers of stone Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet
C#
There have always been a few different ways of dealing with strings of text in C#, depending on what we need we might use any of the following; string normalString = "This is a string, to include a line break we need to escape it like this \n so it
JavaScript
Browsers have varying support for different features in javascript, some support more functions, others support less. I'm not going to be so crass as to name names here but if we wanted to use Array.prototype.find we'd have problems on a certain browser from Redmond[
SQL
Wanting to search for database records within a timeframe is relatively common, particularly if we want to examine error logs. How we search can make a large difference. The two queries below search for the same set of records in the same table but the first query has the potential
jQuery
Having previously blogged about checking if a form has been modified I needed something slightly different I came across dirrty, a jQuery plugin by Ruben Torres that I personally found to have a cleaner implementation than the dirtyFields I previously wrote about. For instance, to check if a form has
C#
The .NET Framework has been updated to 4.6.2 (full announcement here) and it has one feature that is definitely worth shouting from the rooftops about. In this release, we extended the CLR debugging APIs to enable the debugger to request more information and perform additional analysis when a
C#
Update: C#7.1 and .NET Core 2.0 both now support async Main methods! Async code is awesome, that's just science. But when you introduce it to a codebase it tends to bubble all the way back up to your entry point If you're calling
.NET Core
Following on from my post on how to upgrade an ASP.NET 5 application to .NET Core, here's how to configure it. By default a .NET Core web application will listen on port 5000 and will run it as a production environment. We may want to run two
.NET Core
ASP.NET 5 is dead. Long live .NET Core! ASP.NET 5 has been through more than a name change. dnvm, dnu and dnx are gone, all replaced with a single dotnet command. There are a number of new ideas, one of the most immediate being that all .NET Core