Blog - kimserey lam

May 19, 2016

Setup Android Xamarin Forms Fsharp

Sometime setting up a development environment is enough to discourage developers to experiment certain platforms. Most of us (if not all of us) in .NET already heard of Xamarin. But to start working on Xamarin, you need to setup an Android VM and setup the IDE in order to deploy on the Android VM. And it gets worse if, like me, you run Windows on VMWare on OSX (and you want to code in F#). Few months back, Xamarin was kind of a no-no for indie development due to the pricing. But since it merged with Microsoft, it is now free!

May 11, 2016

Deploy Websharper Selfhost

Last week I talked about how to read text from an image using a OCR library. I explained the whole process of creating the web app but I omitted to explain the deployment to Azure. So today I would like to fill this gap by showing you how I deployed the selfhosted web app on Azure. This web app makes use of the WebSharper selfhost template which is composed by a WebSharper sitelet mounted on a OWIN selfhost.

May 07, 2016

Ocr Websharper Extract Text From Images

Last week I talked about how I used Deedle to make some basic statistics on my expenses. Using my bank statements, I showed how to categorize, group, sum and sort expenses in order to have a better view on where the money goes. It was helpful but I realised that instead of checking each transaction from the bank statement, it would be better to track individual item purchased. A lot of expense trackers work this way. We need to input every expense one by one manually. It takes a lot of time which is why I always ended up not using them. I needed to find a faster way.

Apr 28, 2016

Deedle Primer

The first time I encountered Deedle was from @brandewinder’s book Machine learning projects for .NET developers. Deedle is a library which facilitates the manipulation of data frames and data series.

Apr 20, 2016

Fsharp On Mac

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me what was the easiest way to get started with F# on Mac. I pointed him to http://fsharp.org/use/mac/ which gives multiple options to install F# on Mac but it doesn’t contain the option of using VSCode with Ionide. Since I think it is the most straight forward way to have an environment setup to use of F# rapidly especially when someone wants to just have a quick look, I decide to write a blog post to go through the installation step by step.

Apr 17, 2016

Dealing With Stress And Anxiety

Lately I’ve seen a lot of posts about burnout in the the Software industry blogs. Burnout refers to the lost of motivation, hopelessness at work or life, and lost of interest in anything. Stress and anxiety are symptoms which can lead to it.

Apr 14, 2016

Proxies In Websharper

When I first started to play with WebSharper, everything was nice and clean. I was coding in my own world/sandbox/project whatever you want to call it. But the thing is that most of the time, we don’t start from empty, blank project. What we do instead, is that we write code which integrates with an existing application. I was lucky enough to work on a project with a backend written in F# with a Domain library containing all the application domain written in F# as well.

Apr 04, 2016

Drag And Drop Ui Sortable Websharper Uinext

Few weeks ago I covered how to use external JS libraries with WebSharper. I explained how we could integrate taginput which is a cool library that allows us to use tags in our webapp. It was used with JQuery and I showed you how we could extended WebSharper JQuery and add taginput functionalities.

Mar 25, 2016

Var View Lens Listmodel In Websharper Uinext

Last week I needed to make a two way binding for a record with nested lists. More precisely, I needed to observe all changes on this record. This changes included normal members but also lists and I needed to observe changes like adding and removing items.

Mar 23, 2016

Compose Websharper Sitelets With Fsx Files

Lately I’ve been very happy about how WebSharper.Warp allows me to iterate quickly and without pain. Last week, I covered how we could use WebSharper.Warp to build prototypes quickly. Check it out if you haven’t read it yet. Today, I decided to explore how WebSharper.Warp actually works behind the scene.

Mar 18, 2016

Websharper Warp

Scripting quick prototypes in WebSharper can sometimes be troublesome. If for each prototype, a new project has to be created or code needs to be commented/uncommented, it can become quite demotivating as too many steps are required. In F#, .fsx files are a great tool to script disposable code. Write some isolated functions, run on FSI and then forget about it.

Mar 08, 2016

Websharper Forms

In my previous posts, I have covered multiple aspects on how WebSharper can be used to make nice webapps by using animations, by tapping into external JS libaries or by using the built in router in UI.Next to make SPA. Today I would like to cover another aspect which is essential for making useful webapps - Forms.

Mar 01, 2016

Create Animated Menu Websharper

WebSharper.UI.Next exposes a set of functions to animate elements on the page. Today we will see how we can use these functions to create an animated menu with UI.Next. The documentation for animation can be found here. The documentation has links to multiple important components of an animation. In this tutorial, we will only use the Anim.Simple. It is a function defined in Anim module which helps in creating an animation.

Feb 12, 2016

Improving Feedback Loop In Websharper Ui Next With Fake

In my previous posts I explained how to use WebSharper in different ways with Sitelet to build complete backend + frontend web app and with UI.Next to build reactive frontend. If you built the samples, you would have realised that for every changes, a compilation is required to build the JS files. Last week @Tobias_Burger asked me whether I knew a way to improve developer feedback loop when developing web app with WebSharper and that is the subject of this post - Improving developer feedback loop in WebSharper.UI.Next with F#.

Feb 07, 2016

Method Chaining For Bootstrap Components With Websharper

Lately I have been playing extensively with WebSharper and have been working on improving the structure and reusability of Bootstrap components built with WebSharper. I like writing HTML from F# as it allows me to reuse code by using namespaces and modules to group reusable functions and elements. Over the last couple of month, I have tried many ways to make functions which facilitate the creation of Bootstrap components and tried many ways to group them into meaningful modules so that it is easily findable for the next time I want to use them. Out of all the solutions I’ve tried, only one really stood out and it is what I want to share today - Method chaining to build Bootstrap components.