Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

mainly talking about f# here...

this looks like the classic example for f# type providers. there are a few talks tomas petricek[1] has given on that topic. the relevant talk is one of the skillsmatter talks[2]

i'm not sure if they're all publically available, but they used to be at least.

edit: but basically the summary is that you can do really cool things with type providers and have your ide(visual studio) give you full completion on parts of data you want to analyze. kinda like re# but without having to generate half a million lines of xml for web services.

there's also book coming up with chapters about it from tomas [3]

[1] http://tomasp.net/

[2] https://skillsmatter.com/members/tomasp#skillscasts

[3] http://www.manning.com/petricek2/

Thanks for pointing to my talks :-) I think the best recording available is on Channel 9 [1]. Though I really like this Mathias's demo, because it puts all the awesomeness in just 2 minutes, while I needed a full hour!

[1] http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Understanding-the-World-with-...

I've heard a lot about the amazing-ness of type providers, but no-one seems to know how they work aside from saying something betwen they generate types for you, and they generate intellisense for you.

I'm sure it all makes sense once you go ahead and play with it, but it looks like I'll have to be watching some videos to grok what is really going on.

Are you curious about using them or implementing them? What level of detail are you looking for?

I think its knowing what's reasonable to expect from them and what's not reasonable i.e. what is static, what is dynamic, if there are artifacts how do they get created, what if the data schema is dirty...

some of these questions I can answer myself just playing around with them, but I think I'd have to be comfortable implementing them before being comfortable using them.

Slightly blowing my own trumpet, but if you want a brief overview of the basics this might help: http://blog.mavnn.co.uk/type-providers-from-the-ground-up/

Thanks! I'll give it a read.

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