fslang-design VS SQLProvider

The C# compiler got a ton of new smarts around reference type nullability and almost all of the BCL (.NET standard library) got annotated for it. I don't know when F# will finally pick up all the new compile-time smarts for Nullable Reference Types, but it has been proposed and prototyped, at least [1].

[1] https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-10...

Note: For some reason I cant submit the Url with the specific section of the Drawbacks section, but it is here https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/FSharp-7.0...

Does type provider still only support literal strings for definition, right? Supporting records could make it feasible to create something really good as just a side project. I remember suggestions to allow taking record/types but can't find the gh issue or related. Found the rfc. Seems abandoned. It could be a game changer. :(

But, when I try this example from the RFC, I get an "expected option but here has type voption" error.

Add insert/remove/update functions for collections, also Keys/Values for Map

This is https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design/blob/main/RFCs/FS-1079-union-properties-visible.md

Someone writes an RFC about the approved-in-principle suggestion with more details and opens a pull request to https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-design.

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?