Strangelights

Dominic Cooney has create this parser library for F#.

Domonic Cooney has published an interesting blog post on a regular expression interpreter in F#

A developer at work queried me to why RaiseError generates an exception when working with a DataSet but not when working with an IDataReader. Here is a short code fragement that demonstrates the problem.

using System;

If you are not married by the you're 25 birthday you are given cinnamon. If you're still unmarried at 30 you get pepper.

Feedback:

The first big difficultly I had was with the web.config file, choosing the right one is very import, yet there very little explination of the differnce between the configuration files. The configuration files rely heavily on the "HandlerConfiguration" node, this node and it's children provides a bunch of regualar expressions that match agaist the url and redirect you to the apporate places. I choose to use "Single1_Web.config" this was a big mistake as the regualar expression in this file are only suitable this is only sutiable if you intend to run you blog in the root of your web site. If you want to run you're blog in a sub dir then you need "Single2_Web.config".

The second problem I had is that .Text requires you to host it in an IIS application. Not a huge problem if you can do that but my ISP don’t give enough control of IIS to create a sub directory in its own application. After a lot of head scratching I started thinking like this: What exactly does .Text uses the IIS application for? Well it used for two things, to read the user settings out of the sql server database and to decided whether the URL being requested is part of a blog. Neither of these things are exactly require there own application, so I when thought the source searching for .ApplicationFolder and replaced it with the name of the dir I wanted. Yes this was morally wrong to hard code it like that and I felt dirty afterwards but after a little rogering of the vs projects it worked exactly how I wanted it to work, no changes to IIS required.

I'll be noting all f# updates in my blog, so you can just subscribe to the "F# updates" feed and be automatically informed of any new F# updates.

On a related note I've added 5 new tutorals to the f sharp site. A summary of these is available here.