LiteDB.FSharp VS SQLProvider

Personally, I used to use LiteDB which is a NoSQL version which in v4 paired very nicely with F# thanks to Zaid's lovely LiteDB.FSharp library. Sadly, when v5 showed up, a lot of the F# niceties were lost given how the API was changed and v5 was not very F# friendly. You can still use it of course but you fall back to more unsafe F# code which is not ideal.

I have been looking for frameworks to work with databases in f# and found some reasonable. My favorite so far is Dapper.FSharp. It's a very nice CRUD helper. I looked for some 'fsharp helper' for EF and found EFCore.FSharp which does not support discriminated unions unfortunately and does not go very far. I was intrigued by Litedb.FSharp but I would like to stick with sql databases.

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?