F#, MSTest, and FsUnit 1.1.0.0

I've been very busy with a few side projects that I plan to talk more about soon. Sadly, my blog has suffered due to these other activities, but I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about a new MSTest project template available on Visual Studio Gallery as well as some activity going on with FsUnit.

MSTest Project Template:

In the first week of March I released a new project template that helps in the creation of unit tests with MSTest and VS11. You can find it at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/51ebe64a-899b-4959-8c24-b0148ed6b264 or by searching for "fsharp mstest" in the Visual Studio Gallery online templates.

FsUnit:

FsUnit has also had a few enhancements.

1. Support for MsTest has been added for VS11 and made available through a new NuGet package named Fs30Unit.MsTest.

2. A few new assertions have been added for NUnit including NaN, instanceOfType, and unique.

3. FsUnit has long supported a function named "not". While this is a nice feature, the fact that it overwrites an F# operator is not ideal. Because of this, version 1.1.0.0 renames this function to not'. For the purpose of backward compatibility, you can open the module named FsUnitDepricated to make the "not" function available.

One last thing. If you're using FsUnit with NUnit, MbUnit, or xUnit in VS11 Beta, you will need to add binding redirects from previous versions of FSharp.Core to version 4.3.0.0. The easiest way to do this is to use the Add-BindingRedirect PowerShell cmdlet provided by NuGet (http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/package-manager-console-powershell-reference). Here are the steps:

1. After installing one of the FsUnit NuGet packages, create an App.config file (if one doesn't already exist).

2. In the NuGet Package Manager Console, run the following command "Add-BindingRedirect projectname" after replacing projectname with the name of your test project.

A Nice Addition to the Empty WPF F# Template

A few days ago Steffen Formann announced a Xaml type provider that he and Johann Deneux have created that makes writing WPF apps in F# very easy. This type provider allows strongly typed access to the XAML, effectively providing the missing piece to allowing full F# WPF designer support. I've now updated the Empty WPF F# Template to include this type provider.

To use it, all you have to due is download/install the latest version of the F# Empty Windows App (WPF) template in VS11. This will generate an F# project with all the needed WPF assembly references. It also automatically installs the FSharpx.TypeProviders NuGet package and provides the starting point for creating WPF apps with the new Xaml type provider.

Here's a screenshot that's pretty similar to what Steffen showed in the announcement post. Note: The button and label were manually added after creating the project from the updated template.

One other piece that can be helpful when creating WPF apps in F# is the XAML related item templates (i.e. Page, User Control, Window, etc). Item templates are provided via the F# XAML Item Templates extension found at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/06c6ece1-2084-4083-a0f7-934fce9d22fb.

Presentation - CoffeeScript: Good, Bold, and with Sugar

Thanks to all who came out to my talk yesterday at Code PaLOUsa. As mentioned, the slides for the presentation are provided below. You can find the slides + examples at https://github.com/dmohl/CoffeeScriptGoodBoldAndWithSugar and navigate the deck at Slides

F# and ASP.NET Web API

A few weeks ago the ASP.NET team announced the release of ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta. You can read about it here. One of the exciting features that was announced is ASP.NET Web API. ASP.NET Web API provides an excellent programming model for building HTTP services.

One of the sweet spots for F# is in the services layer and this makes ASP.NET Web API + F# great friends. To make it easy to get started with F# and ASP.NET Web API, I've added an ASP.NET Web API template to the already existing F#/C# ASP.NET MVC 4 Visual Studio extension. Note: The template requires that ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta is installed.

To install the template, do the following:

1. Launch the project creation wizard (Ctrl+Shift+N), select Online in the left hand nav, search for "fsharp mvc4", and click OK. In VS11 Beta, it looks something like the following. Note: It may take a few seconds to download.

2. After clicking OK and installing the extension, you will see a dialog that allows the creation of a new ASP.NET Web API solution with an F# project that contains the server-side code.

3. Once the project has been created, you can run it however you desire and hit the service via http://localhost:###/api/values.

Razor Added to the F#/C# ASP.NET MVC 3 Internet Project Template

There's a new version of the F#/C# ASP.NET MVC 3 internet Project Template. This version allows you to choose between the ASPX and Razor view engines.

Here's how to use it:

1. Install version 1.6+ of the project template by searching for it on Visual Studio Gallery and/or updating a version that you had previously installed.

2. Create a new project.

3. You will now see a dialog box similar to what is shown below:

While it's certainly not required in order to use this template, you can see the full source on my GitHub.

ExpectThat with CoffeeScript, Zombie, Mocha, and Node

A few posts ago, I showed how to use ExpectThat with Mocha and Node.js. Today, I'll show a simple example of using ExpectThat with Zombie.js--a full-stack testing framework.

Zombie.js

Zombie.js is a fast, headless testing framework that provides various functionality to write tests that hit your full technology stack. While I generally prefer to write more fine-grained, isolated tests, it's important to also have a few smoke tests and/or integration tests to verify end-to-end functionality. Zombie makes these kinds of tests easy, while allowing me to still use ExpectThat and Mocha.

The Example

Here's a simple example that populates two input elements and then verifies that the values of those input fields contain the expected text.


You can find the full example here.

After a few commands such as " coffee --output lib/ specs/ " and " mocha 'lib/example.spec.js' --reporter spec ", you should see an output that looks something like this:


To learn more about ExpectThat, visit https://github.com/dmohl/expectThat.

Another Way To Kick-start F# WPF Apps

Over the last few years I've announced a number of project templates that are available on Visual Studio Gallery. A few of these have provided ways to kick-start F# WPF apps. I talked about one of these templates here. While these are nice for getting acquainted with building WPF apps in F# and/or F#+C#, the files needed for the included sample app may become a bother once you have a few of these apps under your belt. Because of this, I've released an F# only Empty WPF project template (an F#/C# Empty WPF template will likely be coming soon).

To get the new template, do the following:

1. In Visual Studio 2010 or 11, navigate to File -> New and select Online Templates (or just Online if using VS11).

2. Search for "Daniel Mohl" or "F# Empty Windows App" as shown below:

3. Select the template, click OK, and agree to the install.

While it's certainly not required to use the template, you can find the full source on my GitHub.