Rash thoughts about .NET, C#, F# and Dynamics NAV.

There was a lot of confusion about the document type providers in the last couple of months. The reason was Tomas Petricek and Co. worked on an improved version in the FSharp.Data project and most people lost track which feature was in which project.

In order to make things clearer I removed the Freebase, CSV, JSON and XML type providers from the fsharpx project. From now on they are only in the FSharp.Data project (on github and nuget).

I hope this doesn’t make things worse and I apologize for the confusion. On the bright side you now get a couple of new features and a really cool documentation.

You can read more about this on Tomas’s blog.

The current version of FAKE contains two tasks for Xamarins xpkg format. These are already used in Daniel Nauck’s Portable.Licensing project (read more about this project).

Sample usage:

Thank you Daniel for this contribution.

"Portable.Licensing is a cross platform open source software licensing framework which allows you to implement licensing into your application or library.

It is targeting the Portable Class Library and thus runs on nearly every .NET/Mono profile including Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store App, Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Mac and XBox 360. Use it for your Desktop- (WinForms, WPF, etc.), Console-, Service-, Web- (ASP.NET, MVC, etc.), Mobile (Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android) or even LightSwitch applications."

[Project site]

Yep, you read this correct. This project gives you a free licensing tool for all .NET/mono platforms including stuff like Android and iOS. It’s hosted on github and already on nuget and the Xamarin store, so it’s pretty easy to use – even from F#.

Create a license

There is a really good documentation on the github project page (and there is even a sample implementation for a License Manager app), but just to give you a small glimpse:

Make sure to keep the private key private and distribute the public key with your app.

Validate a license

So try it out and don’t forget to thank Daniel Nauck for this awesome new tool.