Building a fully functional F# web API - s01e02: building our first feature

[@JustSomeAussie1]

I’ve been looking forward to this

[@JoVanEyck]

Thanks for tuning in, good to have you!

[@davidgrant5887]

Would love to see episode 3!!

[@strumjedi]

Keep making these videos, they are a lot of fun.

[@JoVanEyck]

Thank you! More on the way 🚂

[@pino6782]

I think Giraffe got new maintainer(s) so it should be ok. You're making some great content! Thanks!

[@NielsNuyttens]

Good stuff! Funny how you start on the "outside" of the application, I always begin at the domain side :-)

[@JoVanEyck]

I think both approaches are equally valid, it might just come down to personal taste 🍧 Outside-in works best for me personally: it trims all the fat and just-in-case bells and whistles I tend to add otherwise and it allows me to focus on the public API/devex/usability of everything I built. But outside-in requires a ton of discipline to nudge the design incrementally or you end-up with a seperate transaction script copy-paste for each different api call. I used to think outside-in designs always ended up in mocking-hell, but I've picked up some tricks that make mocking unnecessary (like injecting data retrieval functions here, that stuff is super easy to test without mocks).

[@gp5381]

keep going, really nice content!

[@KurtMueller]

Will this series cover authentication and authorization?

[@Pretence01]

Besides from demonstrating some cool F# features, thanks Jo for confirming VS is still the lesser IDE 😀

[@JoVanEyck]

You were right all along! I switched to Rider for this year's advent of code and haven't regretted it yet 💪

[@robhunt8378]

I've tried Rider and in many places seems to be more friendly to F# than Visual Studio. It will autocomplete record fields for you for example, which to this day VS still won't do. It has had this nasty bug for a long time where indent guides are not correctly aligned, which is a big problem when working with whitespace-sensitive languages :D. There's also the issue of licensing so ... By the way, how do you get code autoformatting in Visual Studio? 🙂 Oh, I see there's a VS extension for Fantomas, it's probably that.

[@JoVanEyck]

Correct, I use fantomas. Your comment pushed me over the edge to give rider another try and I haven't looked back since. Thanks for the suggestion!

[@AnythingGodamnit]

I switched from VS to Rider not too long ago. Once I got over the initial Who Moved My Cheese friction, I simply could not believe the quality of life improvement I was getting. It's embarrassing at this point how much better the F# experience is within a JB product than within a MS one. That said, my employer paid for the license and I have no idea of the cost because I never looked into it. I do think I'd struggle to go back to VS at this point, and this recording has reminded me of the day-to-day struggles with doing F# in it.

[@olavre]

Good stuff! Funny to see (or maybe not) that VS is still acting strangely with the red squiggly lines - I remember that from your AoC videos! Must be frustrating as it slows down the coding. Do you have the same problem in VS Code?

[@JoVanEyck]

Oomph yes. I have not tried F# alternative IDE's like VS code or rider for a while now as they always seem to lag a bit when a new F# version releases, but that does not seem to be a valid argument anymore now that VS also fumbles the ball 😅 Do you have experience with F# in vscode? Do you like it?

[@olavre]

@@JoVanEyck Hehe true! I've used F# in vscode for AoC in 2022 and 2023, and it worked fine with Ionide extension! However at some point it would'nt send selected lines to the FSI terminal with Alt + Enter, so I switched to Visual Studio heh. Which worked fine by the way, no lag with squiggly lines.