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


"Every solution will only lead to new problems."

Wednesday, 12. November 2014


Introducing FsReveal – Beautiful, version controlled presentations in the browser

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 13:14 Uhr

This FsReveal tool stack allows you to write beautiful slides in Markdown and brings F# to the wonderful reveal.js web presentation framework.

You write your slides in Markdown like the following and the rest is magic*:

will turn into:

FsReveal slide 1

FsReveal slide 2

FsReveal slide 3

Features
  • Syntax highlighting for most programming languages including C#, F# and LaTeX
  • Speaker notes – shows the current slide, next slide, elapsed time and current time
  • Built in themes
  • Built in slide transitions using CSS 3D transforms
  • Slide overview
  • Works on Windows, Linux and Mac
  • Slides work on mobile browsers. Swipe your way through the presentation.
Getting Started

Just follow the getting started guide at http://fsprojects.github.io/FsReveal/.

Examples

Check out what others have created:

The magic
  • reveal.js – Framework for easily creating beautiful presentations using HTML and JavaScript.
  • Paket – Dependency manager which retrieves the referenced NuGet packages and reveal.js.
  • FAKE – Build tool which allows to orchestrate the slide building process.
  • FSharp.Formatting – Used to render markdown slides and for F# syntax highlighting.
  • Suave.io – Simple web development framework/ webserver which allows to host the slides.
  • git – Allows you to bring your slides under version control.

All of this is bundled in FsReveal, which was originally created by the amazing @kimsk (Karlkim Suwanmongkol) and is now part of fsprojects.

Tuesday, 14. October 2014


Retrieving GitHub download counts

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 13:41 Uhr

A couple of weeks ago we started the Paket project which is released on GitHub. Unfortunately GitHub doesn’t provide any download stats in the UI.

A quick look at the REST API docs shows that we can retrieve the numbers via JSON.

So let’s open Visual Studio reference FSharp.Data and FSharp.Charting and hack a bit with the JSON type provider:

and voilà:

 

Paket download stats Paket download stats

Saturday, 5. July 2014


Microsoft, Open Source development and Codeplex

Filed under: .NET,C#,Diverses,F# — Steffen Forkmann at 12:37 Uhr

Recently Microsoft released all their major programming languages as open source and even started to accept pull requests. I didn’t think this would ever be possible at Microsoft, but they opened up and people like me started to contribute:

Personally I sent 29 (mostly small) pull requests to the Visual F# project. 5 pull requests already got accepted and 15 are still under evaluation.  In principle the development process seems to be working very well. Especially in the Visual F# project Don Syme and the Visual F# team are doing an excellent job to encourage the community. They are marking user voice issues as “approved in principle” and even provide detailed documents for implementation tasks (See CoreLibraryFunctions). This makes it very easy to get started and to hack a bit on the F# compiler. A big thanks to you guys.

A very important part of the open source is the review process. The F# community is awesome in this regards. On issues like a new “compareWith” function I got comments with remarks about coding style, test cases, documentation and lots of new ideas about possible performance improvements. It’s really exciting to be part of such an active and welcoming community. There is only one “but” and this “but” is the choice of the development platform. I really think CodePlex is hindering these projects to become even more successful. In this post I want to show some of my experiences with Codeplex. Remember I already sent 29 pull requests so I think it’s fair to say I tried!

Overall usability

The first impression on the Codeplex site is that every click feels so frustrating slow. Waiting 4s and more for a site to load doesn’t exactly feel like 2014.

If you want to comment on something then there is an “interesting” distinction between issues and pull requests. On issues you get a preview box and some buttons to make formatting easier, but you can’t edit your comments later:

Issue comment editor

On pull request you can edit your comments later but your don’t have the formatting buttons:

Pull request comment editor

 

E-Mail notifications

Like most online portals you can enable E-Mail notifications on Codeplex. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work. I tried to set all notification sliders I found to the max. and still don’t get notifcations if someone sends a new pull request to the Visual F# projects. Instead I’m getting annoying E-Mail notifications on my own activities:

E-Mail notifications on own comments

 

Things like this make you wonder if they actually dogfood their own stuff.

Code reviews on pull requests

As described above good code reviews are a very important part of any software development project, for open source programming language projects even more so. Unfortunately Codeplex has a really bad code review tool. I mean it is possible to comment on diffs:

Comments on diff

But if you update the pull request with a fix then the comment is displayed on the new fixed code and makes no sense any more:

Wrong code comments on diff

The whole code review is broken when you add commits to a pull request and it get’s even messier when you rebase your pull request on the current master. Rebasing pull requests is a very common operation in open source projects since it allows to move the merge effort from the project maintainer to the contributor. But unfortunately Codeplex gets confused by the rebase and now shows a wrong diff:

Wrong diff on rebased pull requests

A code platform shows a wrong diff – yep I couldn’t believe it myself so I tried again. #7040, #7045, #7060, always the same.

Finding the needle in the hashstack

A couple of days ago I wanted to tweet a link to a cool performance trick and knew it was the last commit on a pull request. Now try to find the url:

Alphabetical order by hash

Yes that’s right – the commits are ordered in alphabetical order BY HASH or as I call it in “least useful order”.

Reporting Codeplex issues

Of course you may ask: “Steffen why didn’t you report these issues to the Codeplex team?” and that’s a valid question. Actually I went to codeplex.codeplex.com, which I believe is the home of the Codeplex project, and looked at their issue list. This is what I got:

Codeplex has quite some issues

 

Not a single issue on the first page is related to Codeplex and it seems they don’t even care to close this spam. So why should I care to log issues there?

What now?

It’s more than obvious – use the “move source code to github” strategy and people already created an issue on the TypeScript project. Unfortunately it got closed:

Business needs

After reading this I really doubt it was the decision of the teams to use Codeplex. Fortunately the ASP.NET team seems to be an exception to this. Somehow they managed to move to github.com/aspnet.

There are also other ways. Microsoft could really invest in Codeplex and make it a usable platform. But I don’t see this happing, because it will cost A LOT of money. Even if they would open source Codeplex I don’t see a community which is willing to improve this site.

So I appeal to the people in charge at Microsoft please answer the following questions:

  • What are the reasons for putting the Visual F# project on Codeplex, especially when the majority of the existing F# projects and community already operate on Github?
  • Do you think it’s more important to support Codeplex or to grow a community around the programming language projects?
  • If the F# community voted for the project to be moved, would you consider moving it?
  • If you insist on Codeplex how and when do you plan to fix these usability issues?

So please let your OSS teams and their community pick the open source platform they want!

Monday, 16. June 2014


FAKE 2.18 released – RoundhousE kick edition

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 14:08 Uhr

With the FAKE 2.18.1 we now have 80 contributors.A big thanks to all of you.Here are the most important changes since my last blog post about FAKE 2.14.

What’s new?

More details about minor bug fixes can be found in the release notes.

Getting started

If you new to FAKE you should read the getting started guide or clone the F# ProjectScaffold.

Go and grab the bits

Feel free to contact me if you need help for the upgrade.

Wednesday, 21. May 2014


Changes in the FAKE contribution workflow

Filed under: F#,FAKE - F# Make — Steffen Forkmann at 10:20 Uhr

Two months ago I started to use the RELEASE_NOTES.md files feature in FAKE to describe FAKE’s own changelog. It’s working pretty well with FSharp.Formatting and the whole process got much easier for me. One of the intersting side effects is that I didn’t use the develop branch any more. Pre-release packages can be pushed directly from master.

So in order to make it easier for new contributors I will follow standard git workflow and remove the develop branch completely. Please send your pull request directly to the master branch.

Tuesday, 20. May 2014


Regression in Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 string formatting

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 9:43 Uhr

We are still porting one of our products from Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 (Classic Client) to NAV 2013 R2 and found another strange issue:

On Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 Classic client (Build 6.00.33494):

FORMAT(13.5671,0,'<Integer,4>'); ==> 0013,5671
FORMAT(13.5671,0,'<Precision,0:0><Integer,4>'); ==> 0014

But on Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 (Build 7.10.36281) we get:

FORMAT(13.5671,0,'<Integer,4>'); ==> 0013,5671
FORMAT(13.5671,0,'<Precision,0:0><Integer,4>'); ==> 0013

Not sure if it is that important for practical purposes, but it’s breaking some of our unit tests. ;-(

Monday, 12. May 2014


Weird floating point arithmetic in Dynamics NAV 2013 R2

Filed under: Dynamics NAV 2009,Dynamics NAV 2013,Navision — Steffen Forkmann at 13:42 Uhr

At the moment we are porting one of our products from Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 (Classic Client) to NAV 2013 R2. We have thousands of unit tests and most of them work out of the box.
But now my colleague Matthias Schäfer found a very strange issue. Consider this snippet:

On Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 Classic client (Build 6.00.33494) we get the same message twice:

Dynamics NAV 2009 R2

But on Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 (Build 7.10.36281) we get:

Dynamics NAV 2013 R2

Dynamics NAV 2013 R2

Weird, isn’t it?

Update 1

This is what the Dynamics NAV compiler is emitting:

We assume this is what the Dynamics NAV compiler should do:

Tuesday, 22. April 2014


FAKE 2.14.0 released – OpenCover edition

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 9:43 Uhr

Today I released FAKE 2.14 with some smaller bug fixes and improvements. The biggest feature is that we now have support for OpenCover and ReportGenerator. A big thanks to all of the 65 contributors.

What’s new?

Getting started

If you new to FAKE you should read the getting started guide or clone the F# ProjectScaffold.

Go and grab the bits

Feel free to contact me if you need help for the upgrade.

Monday, 31. March 2014


FAKE 2.12.0 released – NancyFx edition

Filed under: F#,FAKE - F# Make — Steffen Forkmann at 13:16 Uhr

FAKE logo

Today I released FAKE 2.12 with a lot of small bug fixes and improvements. The biggest feature is that we now use NancyFx for FAKE.Deploy. A big thanks to all of the 60 contributors.

What’s new?

  • Add getDependencies to NugetHelper #373
  • Add more F# friendly functions for IO.Path #374
  • SourceLink support #345
  • NancyFx instead of ASP.NET MVC for FAKE.Deploy #376 – big thanks to @MorganPersson
  • Allows to execute processes as unit tests #379
  • Allow to run MsTest test in isolation #367
  • Fixed Nuget.packSymbols #366
  • Fixed bug in SemVer parser #364
  • New title property in Nuspec parameters #359
  • Added option to disabled FAKE’s automatic process killing #357
  • Better AppyVeyor integration #353, #345
  • Added ability to define custom MSBuild loggers #352
  • Fix for getting the branch name with Git >= 1.9 #351
  • Added functions to write and delete from registry #350
  • NUnit NoThread, Domain and StopOnError parameters #349
  • Add support for VS2013 MSTest #346
  • Lots of small fixes

Getting started

If you new to FAKE you should read the getting started guide or clone the F# ProjectScaffold.

Go and grab the bits

Feel free to contact me if you need help for the upgrade.

Tags: ,

Sunday, 23. February 2014


FAKE 2.10 released – more stuff for Dynamics NAV, Windows Azure, FTP, Nuget

Filed under: Diverses — Steffen Forkmann at 15:41 Uhr

FAKE logoToday I released FAKE 2.10 with a lot of small bug fixes and improvements. A big thanks to all of the 55 contributors.

What’s new?

  • Support for Nuget Install
  • AzureHelper allows to control local Azure Emulator
  • Several fixes in FAKE.Deploy (#333)
  • Split Dynamics NAV object files (#335)
  • Support for Dynamics NAV test results (#336)
  • Export objects support for Dynamics NAV (#332)
  • Include/exclude traits support for xUnit (#329)
  • ISSExpress helper allows to host websites in IIS Express (#323)
  • FTP Helpers allow file upload (#322)
  • Breaking Change: OctoHelper contains Packages parameter instead of “PackageVersionOverride” (#320)

Getting started

If you new to FAKE you should read the getting started guide or clone the F# ProjectScaffold.

Go and grab the bits

Feel free to contact me if you need help for the upgrade.

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