This post is intended to show how easy it is to use the F# programming language in order to explore new libraries and get stuff going quickly. It also shows the usage of various great F# features such as Record Types, Discriminated Unions, Computation Expressions and Async workflows, whilst also using a bit of mutable state, integrating with various other 3rd party .NET libraries (including use of an XBOX pad and even a Kinect!), and even some low level bit shifting and masking stuff. F# is definitely NOT [...]

After my talk last night, several people expressed an interest in the script I was using to draw the LINQ expression trees. I have uploaded here on github. This is just a script I use in development. It doesn't visualize every node by a long shot, and does a fair bit of name replacing to make some of the very long generic type names readable.  You will need GraphViz installed to use this script.  You might need to point the function that does the generation at the location where you've installed it.   You [...]

The latest version of the SQL provider can be found on github or at nuget.   PostgreSQL The provider now has support for connecting to PostgreSQL databases! How exciting. Like SQLite, this new mode uses dynamic assembly loading and is based on the .NET connector libraries here.   Once you have your Npgsql libraries you can connect yourself up easily as so: type sql = SqlDataProvider< @"Server=localhost;Port=5432;Database=world;user=postgres;password=sekret;",  Common.DatabaseProviderT[...]

The SqlProvider now supports experimental SQLite access. You can achieve this by supplying the SQL provider some additional static parameters type sql = SqlDataProvider< @"Data Source=F:\sqlite\northwindEF.db;Version=3",Common.DatabaseProviderTypes.SQLITE,@"F:\sqlite\3\" > As you can see, you can now pass SQLITE as the DatabaseVendor static parameter, along with a valid SQLite specific connection string. The third parameter is ResolutionPath.  This is required for a few reasons - the first is that I do not[...]

Introducing my latest type provider, designed to query general SQL databases.  This is very much an alpha cut, it is by no means feature complete, is still a mess in various areas and has only been tested on a very limited selection of databases.  I will provide a brief overview of its main features and lack thereof, followed by a fairly detailed explanation of the most prominent features.  There's other features not discussed here, hopefully there will be some followups to this in the coming weeks, along [...]