We are experimenting with PhoneGap, PhoneGap Build, Ripple emulator and WebSharper. If successful, this will let you write truly cross-platform native mobile apps in F#, quickly pre-testing them in Chrome, and then generating various installers (Android, Windows, iOS - yes, iOS!) without even having to install the SDK. Current mobile HTML 5 application story is this: either you create a mobile-friendly website and have users navigate to it, or you wrap your HTML 5 app into a native app - the second cho[...]

There are several things under the TypeScript umbrella: a type system, language spec, JavaScript-targeting compiler and tooling that provides interactive code completion. I have tried TypeScript on a few small projects, the latest one being TypedPhoneGap. I also worked extensively with the language spec, wrote a parser and analyzer for the `.d.ts` contract specification fragment, pondered the semantics, and engaged in little flamewars on the language forum. My conclusion, in short, is this: the type system[...]

I tend to complain a lot about the programming tools I work with. In one sentence, the world of software is just not a sane place. If left unchecked, this complaining attitude can grow into despair - so I enjoy a little escape from time to time. I need to dream of a better world, where programming is meaningful, fun, beautiful, efficient, mostly automated, and where programs are verified. This is why my escape activity is playing with Coq. One fascinating trick that Coq does really well is computing and m[...]

Latest snapshot of the WebSharper repositories (Bitbucket and at GitHub) showcases some build automation I finally managed to get working. It starts from MSBuild that uses NuGet to pull dependencies, including build dependencies, and then jumps to FAKE - using the alpha pre-release FAKE version has solved some F# version problems I faced earlier. It builds a lot of code, creates an output NuGet package, and also creates several Visual Studio templates that it packages up into a VSIX extensibility package [...]

I am currently working on simplifying build configurations for a bunch of projects including WebSharper, IntelliFactory.Build, IntelliFactory.FastInvoke and eventually multiple WebSharper extensions. I am now using F# and FAKE when possible instead of MSBuild, and relying more heavily on the public NuGet repository. The good news is that abstracting things in F# and sharing common build logic in a library via NuGet really works well, and feels a lot more natural than MSBuild. Consider this Build.fsx file[...]