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:
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 –Â 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.
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
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:
On pull request you can edit your comments later but your don’t have the formatting buttons:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Yes that’s right – the commits are ordered in alphabetical order BY HASHÂ 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:
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:
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!
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?
- New (backwards compatible) CLI #455 – see new docs
- Visual Basic support to AssemblyFileInfo task #471
- Small fixes for OctoTools support #468, #469, #470
- Support for Project RoundhousE #456
- Support for NuGet source packages without a NuGet project file #450
- Support for MSTest settings #428
- Support for BuildFailureTargets #407
- Fake.Deploy agent requires user authentication – see docs
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.
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. ;-(
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.
Today 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.
Today I released FAKE 2.8 with support for JetBrains DotCover and TestFlight.
It’s really awesome to see that this project is getting used more and more. We now have 51 contributors including people from GitHub and Xamarin. A big thanks to all of you.
What’s new?
- DotCover support #318Â (docs)
- TestFlight support #304 (docs)
- FAKE got a logo #308
- Explicit references in NuGet params #295
- Using F# 3.1.1 -> removed the F# compiler bundle from the repository
- Removed dependency to Newtonsoft.JSON from FakeLib.dll
- Ability to pass in F# Interactive Options, namely -d:MONO #302
- “Goto github sources” is working from the docs #309
- FSharp.Formatting task used here
- Fix: ILMergeHelper uses correct TargetKind #312
- Fix: Path resolution issue in MSBuildHelper #315
- Fix: Better logging for git and mspec tasks
- Fix: Make SQL Server Helper compatible with .NET 4.0 #243
- Improvements in the docs
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.
Today I released FAKE 2.6 with support for TravisCI and much better mono support.
What’s new?
- Fix: FileIncludes use stable order #270Â
- Fix: ReleaseNotes parsing was improved #275
- Feature: Some new git helpers
- Using latest SharpZipLib
- Fix: Fixed all unit tests on mono
- Feature: runWithRetry helper #289
- Fix: FAKE is more careful when it tries to kill processes #291
- FAKE has TravisCI build where it builds itself
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.
I’m happy to annouce the FAKE 2.4 release with F# 3.1 support.
What’s new?
Getting started
If you new to FAKE you should read the getting started guide or clone the new F# ProjectScaffold.
Go and grab the bits
Thanks to the 6 new ccontributors in the last months we are now 45! That’s so awesome.
Feel free to contact me if you need help for the upgrade.
