Lev Lazinskiy

Dropping Pakets and F# Bombs

I tried to be clever with the title.

I spent the better part of the evening yesterday trying to get the LaunchDarkly .NET SDK to work in F#. This was a part of my current journey of trying to learn more F# so that I can continue to contribute to the dark porting effort.

My first problem was I was trying to use the Paket package manager which is in use in dark, but for some reason I could not get any of the installed dependencies to be recognized. I randomly got it working in one project when I saved and re-opened a file, but then when I started a new project the same trick didn’t work.

Needless to say I have no idea what I am doing. After spending way too much time troubleshooting this, I just switched back to the built in package manager from the dotnet CLI which uses nuget. This got me to the point where I was able to at least load and recognize the dependency in my F# code.

Sadly, I was not able to get this to actually work. I think the main problems is that I don’t really understand how to use .NET objects from within F# and all of my code, while syntactically correct, looks like object oriented F# (which I guess is kind of a thing, but not really).

The good news is that I am sure I will figure this out given enough time, so onwards for now.