Giraffe VS SQLProvider

Giraffe is another interesting one to explore: https://giraffe.wiki/

Giraffe is nice because it is itself built "just" as ASP.NET Core Middleware so it plays a bit more nicely than Suave with a mixed stack of C#-defined Middleware.

It's more likely you accidentally fall back into just translating C# patterns to non-idiomatic F# with Giraffe, but it's also nicer when in that case of needing to live in both worlds and use a mixture of libraries built for C# ASP.NET projects.

There are also some F# frameworks built on top of ASP.NET core like https://giraffe.wiki

If you have an interest in F#, I highly recommend diving in because (1) it has a ton of things you might learn to appreciate in C#; (2) it has things C# cannot have. I do like some of the suggestions people have made regarding mixing your code bases, but I'll also say that building, say, endpoint routing in Giraffe is (to repeat myself) easy, simple, and elegant.

Bix is a micro-framework designed with F# in mind and that runs on both Deno and Bun! and in theory it also should even run in a service worker! (intercepting fetch requests) although I haven't tested that yet, it offers a general purpose handler that coupled with a set of route definitions it can bring a Giraffe/Saturn like framework to life in JavaScript runtimes which is incredibly awesome! useful? maybe not 😅, but awesome indeed. Let's see some code for it

Backend: Most likely it would be a toss between https://saturnframework.org or https://giraffe.wiki. They both combins the extremely good type system in F# combined with the ease of a minimal API.

I was wondering if its possible to simultaneously run a C# core MVC project in combination with https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe

By default Giraffe, the framework which I use as a web server, uses Newtonsoft.Json to serialize results to JSON. However, for discriminated union, it generates quite a lot of JSON so I've switched to System.Text.Json which is built into newer versions of .Net Core. In combination with FSharp.SystemTextJson package allows serializing discriminated unions more gracefully. All we need is to decorate Branch type with JsonFSharpConverter(JsonUnionEncoding.BareFieldlessTags) attribute.

Giraffe is a library that sits atop ASP.NET Core and allows developers to build web applications in a functional style; dotnet new giraffe is literally my starting point when I begin a new web application project. (Rather than write three more sentences filled with effusive praise, I’ll just leave it at that; it’s great.) It also provides a view engine (that builds upon Suave‘s “experimental” view engine) which uses an F# DSL to define HTML in a strongly-typed way. It has been incredibly efficient for a while, but with .NET’s work over the past two releases at improving performance, and Giraffe’s adoption of those techniques, it is lightning fast.

Wrapping ASP.NET Core to be easier and more idiomatic with F# seems to be a common domain. Out of curiosity, did you look at any existing projects? If so, what was lacking from them that made you decide to write WebFrame?

Giraffe: https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe

For completeness, there is also the SqlDataProvider, which I only tried out a little years ago, before composibility was baked in. Worth a look.

Have you heard of type providers? https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/ I think this library might be what you are looking for

Database: SQL or Event Store. If SQL, One of https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/, https://github.com/Dzoukr/Dapper.FSharp or https://github.com/SQLStreamStore/SQLStreamStore

One of the more popular Type Providers I used is the SQL Provider, but even it has severe limitations when it comes to .NET Core.

There was a wave of popularity in 2017 as well. I used to work on it full time back then, and enjoyed it a lot. The SQLProvider [0] and other type providers like it are super impressive!

[0] https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/

(1) F# Type Providers still blow my mind.

Strongly typed SQL/XML/CSV/JSON without boilerplate is a massive leap forward, and it's a shame that it hasn't caught on.

https://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/#Example

Like this?

So... I'm a little bit lost here. I must say, I love this language, but documentation is definitely not its greatest strength. I've looked at the SQLProvider documentation and found no information. Then I looked through the repository issues and found a lot of people with similar issues and, even though they should theoretically be solved with version 1.2, I tried doing what ended up working for them, with little luck. I've tried different combinations of library targets and dependencies versions but none worked.

So when I clone a typical open source F# project from GitHub (e.g. SQLProvider, to pick a recent one that I wrestled with), I'm often at a loss how to build and debug the thing. I've figured out that running build.cmd is usually a good place to start, but then what? Can I still open the .sln in Visual Studio and build/debug it there?