Category: Misc Languages

Mike Bronowski does a thing I don’t want to do:

While ago I have written a post about saving Outlook attachments with PowerShell and that that was actually the thing I learned from the topic I want to describe today.

I could not use PowerShell at that moment (security, security), so had to figure it out in the most common scripting language in office – VBA.

Read on to learn how.

Diogo Souza shows off the Suave framework:

F# is the go-to language if you’re seeking functional programming within the .NET world. It is multi-paradigm, flexible, and provides smooth interoperability with C#, which brings even more power to your development stack, but did you know that you can build APIs with F#? Not common, I know, but it’s possible due to the existence of frameworks like Suave.io.

Suave is a lightweight, non-blocking web server. Since it is non-blocking, it means you can create scalable applications that perform way faster than the ordinary APIs. The whole framework was built as a non-blocking organism.

I will shout from the rooftops that data platform developers should learn functional programming. In the .NET space, that’s F#.

Patrick Smacchia looks at two new operators in C#:

C#8 added the index ^ and range .. operators. In this post I am attempting to demystify both in the most comprehensive way.

Read on for the demos. I’m not sure I like how the range operator is exclusive on the right-hand side, but I suppose it’s just a matter of remembering that in this language, it’s exclusive and in others it can be inclusive.

Kyle Buzzell looks at time series databases:

As the name implies, a time series database (TSDB) makes it possible to efficiently and continuously add, process, and track massive quantities of real-time data with lightning speed and precision. While other database models have been used for these kinds of workloads in the past, TSDBs utilize specific algorithms and architecture to deal with their unique needs.

In this piece, we’ll take a deeper look at time series databases, including the unique needs of the workloads they’re built for, their benefits, common use cases, and the TSDBs out there.

Click through for an overview. Time series databases are definitely a niche product, but they are really good inside that niche.

Erik Ejlskov Jensen shows us a way to set a default command timeout in .NET’s Microsoft.Data.SqlClient:

With the latest 2.1.0 preview 2 release of the open source .NET client driver for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database, Microsoft.Data.SqlClient, it is now possible to set the default command timeout via the connection string.

Now you can work around timeout issues simply by changing the connection string, where this previously required changes to code, and maybe changes to code you did not have the ability to change.

This is pretty nice, as my recollection was that you could set connection timeout via connection string, but not command timeout. And not everything’s going to wrap up nicely within 30 seconds.

Patrick Smacchia walks us through record types in C# 9:

The second core property of string and record value-based semantic is immutability. Basically, an object is immutable if its state cannot change once the object has been created. Consequently, a class is immutable if it is declared in such way that all its instances are immutable.

I remember a discussion with a developer that got nervous about immutability. It looked like an unnatural constraint to him: he wanted his object’s state to change. But he didn’t realized that something he used everyday – string operations – relied on immutability. When you are modifying a string actually a new string object gets created. Records behave the same way. Moreover a clean new syntax based on the keyword with has been introduced with C#9. 

They aren’t as fancy as F# record types, but it is fun to watch C# move slowly to being a functional-friendlier language—something which has been the case since Don Syme helped implement generics in C#.