Tech Mesh - The Alternative Programming Conference is designed to support and promote useful non-mainstream technologies in the software industry and dedicated to users and inventors of various languages and technologies. By offering a networking platform to IT architects, software developers and project managers it brings together different programming worlds and creates opportunities to exchange experiences and knowledge, necessary to pick the ”the right tool for the job”.

WebSharper provides an extension to write ExtJS applications in F#. But did you know that you can easily use the visual designer ExtJS Architect in conjunction with WebSharper? Here is how.

In the previous post, I discussed designing combinator libraries that compose some property over unions. It is only fitting to throw records in the mix. type U = | A of int | B of float | C of string let UFormat = ( UnionCase A IntFormat << UnionCase B FloatFormat << UnionCase C StringFormat ) |> Union (fun a b c x -> match x with | A x -> a x | B x -> b x | C x -> c x) type R = { A : int B : float [...]

Discriminated unions or sum types are a natural way to model logical OR. Often you have a property that distributes over OR. Say, in F# (used throughout the article, though the ideas should apply equally well to any ML), you can write a combinator of the type: P<'T1> → P<'T2> → P<Choice<'T1,'T2>> How to go from here to a nice set of combinators that would handle an arbitrary union? This question has been on my mind for a while, and finally I have an acceptable solution. As a disclaimer, at the level of [...]

There is news on the faster F# Printf.* story. We released an alternative implementation as a package today. NuGet: IntelliFactory.Printf Source: https://bitbucket.org/IntelliFactory/printf Some background: F# Printf.* functions are a very nice interface for formatted printing, but the default implementation is quite slow, which is undesirable for production use (say, for logging inside a server). I believe the F# team is addressing this for their next release - and when it comes, it is going to be aw[...]