Month: September 2020

Creating FableTrek – Part 1

If you want to follow along with this series of posts the source code and be found here, the published game here and the source for this specific post here.

If you read my blog or follow me on Twitter you’ll know I’ve really fallen in love with F# this last year and am using the SAFE stack to build out my cycling performance application. A big part of that toolkit is Fable – the F# to JavaScript transpiler that also comes with some great bindings and tools for building single page applications.

A few people have asked me how to get started with Fable, why I think F# is so well suited for this kind of work, and how to make the transition from C# and so I thought I’d build out a simple game using Fable and talk about it in a series of posts / videos.

Now before anyone gets too excited this isn’t going to be the next Halo! Instead I’m going to rework my iOS version of the classic Star Trek game (PaddTrek) into Fable – now called FableTrek!

PaddTrek – an early iPad game

Its not going to be flashy but hopefully strikes the right balance between complex enough to show real problems and solutions and simple enough to understand. I don’t have a grand up-front plan for building out this game and I’m creating each part as I go – lets just hope it doesn’t turn out like the new Star Wars trilogy!

I’ll also add that I still class myself as a relative beginner with F# but I do manage to get stuff done.

With all that out of the way – lets take a look at the first code drop.

Exploring the code

To get started I used this bare bones starting point for a simple Fable app with webpack and debug support for Visual Studio Code (hat tip to Isaac Abraham who created this for me to help me out a little while back).

I’ve then added a few things to it:

One of the first things to wrap your head round with Fable is that it lives in both .NET and JavaScript worlds. And so in the root folder you’ll find a package.json and a webpack.config.js and in the src folder a F# project file – App.fsproj.

When adding dependencies you’ll often find yourself adding both a NuGet package and an npm package. I’m using the dotnet command line tools to manage the former and yarn for the latter.

The Fable compiler itself is generally invoked through webpack using the fable-loader plugin. I’ve got a fairly simple webpack file – I’ve added support for Stylus and a little work to output a production build to a deploy folder.

App.fs and Index.html – entry point

Starting up a React app in F# is not much different to doing the same with JavaScript or TypeScript. First you need a HTML file:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Fable</title>
  <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8'>
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="fable.ico" />
</head>
<body>
    <div id="trek-app"></div>
</body>
</html>

We’re going to create the React app inside the trek-app div block. You might notice their is no <script> tag – so how does any code get invoked? I’ve set up webpack to inject the <script> tag during the build process using the HtmlWebpackPlugin plugin – this way we can handle unique script filenames that include a hash component.

The code entry point for our app is App.fs in the source folder. At the top of the file first we import some dependencies:

open Elmish
open Fable.React
open App.Types
open App.State
open Fable.Core.JsInterop

importSideEffects "./game.styl"

The interesting line here is the final one where we import game.styl. This is our Stylus CSS file. Importing it like this will ensure webpack will compile it to CSS and include it in our final bundle – to do this I’ve used the stylus-loader package for webpack.

If we skip to the end of the file we can see a block of code that starts up a Fable Elmish based React app:

Program.mkProgram init update root
|> Program.toNavigable (parseHash Router.pageParser) urlUpdate
#if DEBUG
|> Program.withConsoleTrace
|> Program.withDebugger
#endif
|> Program.withReactBatched "trek-app"
|> Program.run

We’re passing in a whole load of stuff to this startup block – init, update, root, pageParser and urlUpdate are the basic building blocks of our Elmish app. And so I guess its time I answered the question: what is Elmish?

Elmish…

… is a set of abstractions that allow us to implement the Model View Update pattern in F# based on Elm. Essentially its a pattern where a user interface (a view) is created from immutable state and from which messages are passed back to our program to update the state (via a transformation – its immutable) and regenerate the view. To make this work their are a number of concepts which I’ve started to flesh out in our game.

Thomas Bandt has written a blog post around a simple counter example that introduces the same concepts that is worth reading before continuing. I’m going to go through the same concepts but using the game we’re creating which is a little more complex as we have more data to model and in our game I’m subdividing the system into smaller sub-applications.

Model

The model contains our application state and the best way to express this in F# is using a record. You can see our applications top level model in our App.Types.fs file:

type Model =
  {
    CurrentPage: Router.Page
    StartScreen: Interface.StartScreen.Types.Model option
  }
  static member Empty =
    { CurrentPage = StartScreenPage
      StartScreen = Some Interface.StartScreen.Types.Model.Empty
    }

Our root model keeps track of the current page we’re looking at (based on a URL – we’ll look at the router later) and the state for our sub-applications of which we currently only have one – the start screen. These are optional pieces of state that we create as required as the URL changes. I’ve added a static member that returns an empty model that we can use when we need to initiate a default model.

Being records the state is immutable and we’ll look at how we manage updates to this a little later.

The StartScreen model is currently just a placeholder which we’ll flesh out in later parts.

Messages

Messages are what we use to glue our system together. They’re typically sent by the user interacting with our views through a dispatcher and are handled by update functions that we’ll look at in a moment. Each of our sub-applications will have its own set of messages only visible within its own scope – this makes for a great way to isolate the moving parts of a system and is particularly useful in large systems like my cycling analytic website. It means I can change one sub-application without worrying about breaking others.

In our game you can find the messages for the start screen sub-application in Interface/StartScreen/Types.fs:

type StartScreenMsg =
  | NewGame

When we flesh out our start screen this message will be dispatched when the user clicks a new game button.

Discriminated unions are almost tailor made for messages. If you come from a C# background you might think they look like an enumerated type but they are much more! For one thing they can be associated with payloads and we already have an example of this – we use a top level set of messages that themselves encapsulate our sub-application messages to enable our program to route messages to the correct sub-application. You can see an example of this in App.Types.fs:

type Msg =
  | GameScreenDispatcherMsg
  | StartScreenDispatcherMsg of Interface.StartScreen.Types.StartScreenMsg

Updates

Update functions are how we respond to messages and update our state however they never modify state. Instead given the current state and a message they return new state and a command (often another message).

We don’t yet have a simple example of this but we do have an example of an update function coordinating between our sub-applications which you can find in App.State.fs:

let update msg model =
  match (msg, model) with
  | (StartScreenDispatcherMsg subMsg, { StartScreen = Some extractedModel }) ->
    let (subModel, subCmd) = Interface.StartScreen.State.update subMsg extractedModel
    { model with StartScreen = Some subModel}, Cmd.map StartScreenDispatcherMsg subCmd
  | _ ->
    console.error("Missing match in App.State")
    model, Cmd.none

If you’re not familiar with F# you might currently be asking what is this crazy wizardry. I’ll try and break it down! F# has great support for pattern matching – we begin a match set using the match with construct. In our case we’re saying match the msg and model together (what we’re actually doing is creating a tuple out of the message and the model).

Each pattern for consideration, they are evaluated in order, is started with the pipe | operator and in our case we have two possible matches.

Our first pattern match we look for a message of type StartScreenDispatcherMsg and a model that has the StartScreen attribute set to Some. While matching we can also extract values – in our case we’re extracting the sub message for the start screen and the model we have assigned to StartScreen. If we find these things then we pass them on to to our sub-applications updater – it also returns a model and a command. Finally we return a model with the new submodel returned by our child updater and whatever command it returned.

Our second match (the one that reads | _) is our fall through match. This will match anything and simply return the model and the command but pop an error into our browsers console. I’ve got no implementation at all yet for the GameScreenDispatcherMsg.

Routing

I briefly mentioned routing earlier when we looked at models – routing being the process of displaying the correct content within a SPA for a given URL. Elmish comes with some support for routing which I’ve used to build the router here which you can find in Router.fs. Firstly we use a disciminated union to define our routes:

type Page =
  | StartScreenPage
  | GameScreenPage

If we had sub-routes we could use the payload of a discriminated union to nest them but we don’t (at least not yet) so for now that’s it. Next we need a way to turn out union members into URL paths:

let private toHash page =
  match page with
  | StartScreenPage -> "#/"
  | GameScreenPage -> "#/game"

Here I’m using hash based paths but you can also use full paths. Finally we need a parser – a function that can extract values from routes and return a correctly structured Page discriminated union. We don’t have any parameters for the routes yet so this is quite simple:

let pageParser =
  oneOf [
    map GameScreenPage (s "game")
    map StartScreenPage top
  ]

Finally when a URL changes we need a way of updating the current page and state in our model. In App.State.fs we have a urlUpdate function:

let urlUpdate (result: Option<Router.Page>) model =
  match result with
  | None ->
    console.error("Error parsing url: " + window.location.href)
    model, Router.modifyUrl model.CurrentPage
  | Some page ->
    let model = { model with CurrentPage = page}
    match page with
    | StartScreenPage ->
      let (subModel, subCmd) = Interface.StartScreen.State.init () 
      { model with StartScreen = Some subModel }, Cmd.map StartScreenDispatcherMsg subCmd
    | _ -> model, Cmd.none

This is very similar in form to a regular update function except rather than take a message in takes our page discriminated union. Like the regular update it returns an updated model and command.

Views

Ok. With all that plumbing in place we need a way of transforming our state into user interface and we do that with views. Our root view can be found in App.fs:

let root model dispatch =
  div [Class "container"] [
    match model with
    | { CurrentPage = Router.Page.StartScreenPage ; StartScreen = Some extractedModel } ->
      Interface.StartScreen.View.root model dispatch
    | _ -> div [] [str "not found"]
  ]

Like much of our code so far this is somewhat infrastructural – it looks at our model, determines the current sub-application based on the route, and delegates its handling down to that (which you can find in Interface/StartScreen/View.fs):

let root model dispatch =
  div [Class "startScreen"] [
    div [Class "title"] [str "< work in progress >"]
  ]

If you come from a typical React background you’re probably used to using JSX – a DSL that is extremely similar to HTML. In F# we use a DSL that is, well, F#. Its still very similar in use but being F# is typesafe and because its F# you don’t have those slightly awkward breaks between JSX and JavaScript. We’ll see later on how easy it is to use with FP techniques to create complex interfaces cleanly.

Styling with Stylus

I’m building the CSS by hand for this project and to help me do that I’m using a preprocessor called Stylus. I like it because it removes a lot of the noise and clutter from a CSS file. You can find the, fairly limited, amounts of CSS in our game.styl file.

For the time being I’m referring to class names by strings but I may do something about this as we progress 🙂

Putting it all together

If we wind back to where we started and look at the block of code at the bottom of App.fs:

Program.mkProgram init update root
|> Program.toNavigable (parseHash Router.pageParser) urlUpdate
#if DEBUG
|> Program.withConsoleTrace
|> Program.withDebugger
#endif
|> Program.withReactBatched "trek-app"
|> Program.run

You can see how all these bits we’ve looked at are brought together in the first two lines of this to create our Elmish program that can now parse URLs, update models, and translate models into views.

Deploying to Azure Static Web Hosting with GitHub Actions

Right back at the start of this piece I shared a link to the game running live on the web – you can find it at https://www.fabletrek.com. Its not all that exciting at the moment:

But it is running – and its deploying automatically and directly of the GitHub repository using GitHub Actions and Azure Static Web Apps. This solution doesn’t come with automatic support for Fable but its pretty straightforward to add.

Start by creating the Azure Static Web App itself in Azure following these instructions. For the app artifact directory enter deploy but otherwise follow those instructions.

This will create a GitHub Action for you in the repository but if you run it you’ll get an error stating that the job they provide doesn’t know how to build out code. Their is support for using a custom build command (and we build our solution with the command yarn webpack) but I found using that gives an error with locating and running dotnet from within the Fable compiler webpack loader.

Instead what we need to do is move the build outside of their job so all we need to then do is pick up the contents of our deploy folder. To do that we add these steps:

      - name: Setup .NET Core
        uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
        with:
          dotnet-version: 3.1.402
      - name: Install .NET dependencies
        working-directory: "src"
        run: dotnet restore
      - name: Install JS dependencies
        run: yarn install
      - name: Build
        run: yarn webpack

This makes sure the correct version of .NET Core is installed, restores our NuGet and NPM packages, and then finally builds the solution.

We then need to modify the provided Azure Static Web App job to prevent it from trying to build the solution again. Their is no way to disable the build process but what you can do is supply it with a harmless build command – rather than build anything I simply run yarn –version:

         with:
          azure_static_web_apps_api_token: ${{ secrets.AZURE_STATIC_WEB_APPS_API_TOKEN_UNIQUE_FOR_YOU }}
          repo_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} # Used for Github integrations (i.e. PR comments)
          action: "upload"
          ###### Repository/Build Configurations - These values can be configured to match you app requirements. ######
          # For more information regarding Static Web App workflow configurations, please visit: https://aka.ms/swaworkflowconfig
          app_location: "/" # App source code path
          api_location: "api" # Api source code path - optional
          app_artifact_location: "deploy" # Built app content directory - optional
          # we need a separate build step as the fable-compiler fails when run under the context of the static site builder
          # and their is no disable build property that I am aware of so we run a harmless command
          app_build_command: "yarn --version"
          ###### End of Repository/Build Configurations ######

With those changes made every time you commit code to your branch it will be built and deployed. You can find the complete action here. I then added a custom domain which gives you a free SSL cert too.

Next Steps

That’s the setup part done really – if you’re new to Fable, F# and Elmish then this I think is the more complex bit. In the next stage we’ll build out a start screen and get to the point where we can start a new game.

Azure SQL Database deployment with Farmer, DbUp and GitHub Actions

Farmer is a DSL for generating and executing ARM templates and one of the great things about it is that its based on .NET Core. That means that you can use it in combination with other components from the .NET ecosystem to create end to end typesafe deployment solutions.

As an aside – I recently posted a critique of Microsofts new DSL Bicep. One of the things I didn’t mention in that but did in a series of tweets was the shortcomings of inventing a new language that lives in its own ecosystem.

Ultimately Bicep will need to support “extension points” or you’ll have to wrap them in script and communicate information across boundaries (of course their can be benefits to that approach too). Not to mention they need to write all the tooling from scratch and developers / administrators need to learn another language.

By taking the approach Farmer has handling boundaries is a lot cleaner – as we’ll see – and we can take advantage of some neat language features.

In this example I’m going to provision an Azure SQL Database into Azure and then upgrade its schema using DbUp and we’ll run all this through GitHub Actions giving us an automated end to end deployment / upgrade system for our SQL database. You could do this with less F# code (almost none) but I also want to try and illustrate how this approach can form a nice framework for more complicated deployment scenarios so we’re also going to look at error handling across a deployment pipeline.

As all the components themselves are well documented I’m not going to go end to end on all the detail of each component here – instead I’m going to focus on the big picture and the glue. You can find the code for the finished demonstration on GitHub here.

Starting with a F# console app, adding the Farmer NuGet package, and the boilerplate Program.fs file first we need to declare our Azure resources – in this case a SQL Server and a database and then bring them together in an ARM template:

let demoDatabase = sqlServer {
    name serverName
    admin_username "demoAdmin"
    enable_azure_firewall
    
    add_databases [
        sqlDb { name databaseName ; sku DbSku.Basic }
    ]
}

let template = arm {
    location Location.UKWest
    add_resource demoDatabase
    output "connection-string" (demoDatabase.ConnectionString databaseName)
}

Pretty straightforward but a couple of things worth noting:

  1. Both serverName and databaseName are simple constants (e.g. let databaseName = “myDatabaseName”) that I’ve created as I’m going to use them a couple of times.
  2. Opening up the database to azure services (enable_azure_firewall) will allow the GitHub Actions Runner to access the database.
  3. On the final line of our arm block we output the connection string for the database so we can use it later.

That’s our Azure resources but how do we apply our SQL scripts to generate our schema? First we’ll need to add the dbup-sqlserver NuGet package and with that in place we’ll first add a Scripts folder to our solution and in my example four scripts:

DbUp keeps track of the last script it ran and applies subsequent scripts – essentially its a forward only ladder of migrations. If you’re adding scripts of your own make sure you mark them as Embedded Resource otherwise DbUp won’t find them. To apply the scripts we simply need some fairly standard DbUp code like that shown below, I’ve placed this in a F# module called DbUpgrade so, as we’ll see in a minute, we can pipe to it quite elegantly:

let tryExecute =
  Result.bind (fun (outputs:Map<string,string>) ->
    try
      let connectionString = outputs.["connection-string"]
      let result =
        DeployChanges
          .To
          .SqlDatabase(connectionString)
          .WithScriptsEmbeddedInAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly())
          .LogToConsole()
          .Build()
          .PerformUpgrade()
      match result.Successful with
      | true -> Ok outputs
      | false -> Error (sprintf "%s: %s" (result.Error.GetType().Name.ToUpper()) result.Error.Message)
    with _ -> Error "Unexpected error occurred upgrading database"
  )

If you’re not familiar with F# you might wonder what this Result.bind function is. F# has a wrapper type for handling success and error states called options and a bunch of helper functions for their use. One of the neat things about it is it lets you chain lots of functions together with an elegant pattern for handling failure – this is often referred to as Railway Oriented Programming.

We’ve now declared our Azure resources and we’ve got a process for deploying our upgrade scripts and we need to bring it all together and actually execute all this. First lets create our deployment pipeline that first provisions the resources and then upgrades the database:

let deploymentPipeline =
  Deploy.tryExecute "demoResourceGroup" [ adminPasswordParameter ]
  >> DbUpgrade.tryExecute 

If we had additional tasks to run in our pipeline we’d join them together with the >> operator as I’ve done here.

To run the deployment we need to provide an admin passford for SQL server which you can see in this code snippet as sqlServerPasswordParameter and we need to do this securely – so it can’t sit in the source code. Instead as I’m going to be running this from GitHub Actions an obvious place is the Secrets area of GitHub and an easy way to make that available to our deployment console app is through an environment variable in the appropriate action (which we’ll look at later). We can then access this and format it for use with Farmber by adding this line:

let adminPasswordParameter =
  Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("ADMIN_PASSWORD") |> createSqlServerPasswordParameter serverName

Farmer uses a convention approach to a parameter name – I’ve built a little helper function createSqlServerPassword to form that up.

(We could take a number of different approaches to this – ARM parameters for example – I’ve just picked a simple mechanism for this demo)

Finally to invoke all this we add this line at the bottom of our file:

template |> deploymentPipeline |> asGitHubAction

asGitHubAction is another little helper I’ve created that simply returns a 0 on success or prints a message to the console and returns a 1 in the event of an error. This will cause the GitHub Action to fail as we want.

That’s the code side of things done. Our finished Program.cs looks like this:

open System
open Farmer
open Farmer.Builders
open Sql
open Constants
open Helpers

[<EntryPoint>]
let main _ =
  let adminPasswordParameter =
    Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("ADMIN_PASSWORD") |> createSqlServerPasswordParameter serverName

  let demoDatabase = sqlServer {
    name serverName
    admin_username "demoAdmin"
    enable_azure_firewall
      
    add_databases [
      sqlDb { name databaseName ; sku DbSku.Basic }
    ]
  }

  let template = arm {
    location Location.UKWest
    add_resource demoDatabase
    output "connection-string" (demoDatabase.ConnectionString databaseName)
  }

  let deploymentPipeline =
    Deploy.tryExecute "demoResourceGroup" [ adminPasswordParameter ]
    >> DbUpgrade.tryExecute 
  
  template |> deploymentPipeline |> asGitHubAction

All we need to do now is wrap it up in a GitHub Action. I’ve based this action on the stock .NET Core build one – lets take a look at it:

name: Deploy SQL database

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Setup .NET Core
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      with:
        dotnet-version: 3.1.301
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: dotnet restore
    - name: Build
      run: dotnet build --configuration Release --no-restore
    - name: Login via Az module
      uses: azure/login@v1.1
      with:
        creds: ${{secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS}}
        enable-AzPSSession: true
    - name: Run
      env:
        ADMIN_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.ADMIN_PASSWORD}}
      run: dotnet DeployDb/bin/Release/netcoreapp3.1/DeployDb.dll

If you’re familiar with GitHub Actions most of this should be fairly self explanatory – there’s nothing special about our deployment code, its a standard .NET Core console app so we begin by building it as we would any other (again this is one of the things I like about Farmer – its just .NET, and if you’re using .NET there’s nothing else required). However after building it we do a couple of things:

  1. To do the deployment Farmer will use the Azure CLI and so we need to login to Azure via that. We do that in the Login via Az module step which is pretty stock and documented on GitHub here. I’ve stored the secret for the service principal in the secrets area of GitHub.
  2. In the final step we run our deployment – again its just a standard console app. You an see in this step the use of the env section – we take a secret we’ve called ADMIN_PASSWORD and set it as an environment variable making it available to our console app.

And that’s it! At this point you’ve got an automated solution that will make sure your Azure SQL database infrastructure and its schema are managed get up to date. Change the configuration of your SQL database and/or add a SQL script and this will kick off and apply the changes for you. If / when you run it for the first time you should see output like this from the build section of the Action:

I think its a simple, but powerful, example of infrastructure as code and the benefits of using an existing language and ecosystem for creating DSLs – you get so much for free by doing so. And if the rest of your codebase is in .NET then with Farmer you can share code, whether that be simple constants and names or implementation, easily across your deployment and runtime environments. Thats a big win. I’m slowly adding it into my Performance for Cyclists project and this approach here is largely lifted from their.

Finally I think its worth emphasising – you don’t need to really know F# to use Farmer and you certainly don’t need to be using it elsewhere in your solution. Its a pretty simple DSL build on top of F# and a fantastic example of how good F# is as a basis for DSLs. I’ve dug a little deeper into the language here to integrate another .NET tool but if all you want to do is generate ARM templates then, as you can see from the Farmer examples on its website, you really don’t need to get into the F# side (though I do encourage you to!).

Bicep – an utterly uninspiring start

I’m not sure when it went public but Microsoft now have an alpha of Bicep available on GitHub. Bicep is their attempt to deal with the developer unfriendly horror and rats nest that is ARM templates.

I took a look at it today and came away thoroughly disappointed with what I saw. Before I even started to look at the DSL itself the goals raised a whole bunch of red flags… so lets start there.

And strap in… because this is going to be brutal.

Bicep Goals

  1. Build the best possible language for describing, validating, and deploying infrastructure to Azure.
    Laudable.
  2. The language should provide a transparent abstraction for the underlying platform. There must be no “onboarding step” to enable it to a new resource type and/or apiVersion in Bicep.
    Seems important. Azure moves fast and new things are added all the time. On the one hand it would be nice to see each push of a new resource / API to Azure be coupled to some nice Bicep wrapping – but given the breadth and pace of what goes on its probably not realistic.

    On the other hand…. this seems dangerous. There’s a lot of intricacy in that stuff and if we just boil down to expressing the ARM inside strings with a bit of sugar round it what have we gained?
  3. Code should be easy to understand at a glance and straightforward to learn, regardless of your experience with other programming languages.
    Ok. No great quibble here.
  4. Users should be given a lot of freedom to modularize and reuse their code. Reusing code should not require any ‘copy/paste’.
    Seems weak. I’d like to see this strengthened such that writing new Bicep code shouldn’t require copy/paste – see my point (2) above as these things seem somewhat coupled. Cough. Magic strings. Cough.
  5. Tooling should provide a high level of resource discoverability and validation, and should be developed alongside the compiler rather than added at the end.
    On the one hand I don’t disagree. On the other… this seems like a bit of a cop out back to magic strings.
  6. Users should have a high level of confidence that their code is ‘syntactically valid’ before deploying.
    Wait. What? A “high level of confidence”. I don’t want a high level of confidence. I want to know. Ok – if I’m on the bleeding edge and the Azure resource hasn’t been packed into some nice DSL support yet then ok. But if I’m deploying, say, a vanilla App Service I don’t want a high level of confidence – I want to know.

I don’t about you but to me this sounds like it has the hallmarks of another half baked solution (“no its awesome” – random Twitter devrel) that still requires you to remember a bunch of low level details. And probably still relies on strings.

The Tutorial

Next I cautiously cracked open the tutorial… oh god.

Strings galore. Strings for well known identities. The joy. I’ve not installed the tooling but I assume it helps you pick the right string. But really? REALLY? Strings.

I was pretty horrified / disappointed so I continued through hoping this was just the start but as far as I can tell – nope. Strings are a good idea apparently. This is the final example for storage:

Same dogs dinner.

I can absolutely see why you want some form of string support in their. As I noted in the goals if a new API version is released you want to be able to specify it. But there are ways to achieve this that don’t involve this kind of untyped nonsense. In the normal course of events for common things like Storage accounts the only strings in use should be for names.

No wonder they can only give “confidence” things are syntactically correct.

The tutorial finishes with “convert any ARM template to Bicep” – its not hard is it. This is still a thin low value wrapper on top of ARM. We’ve just got rid of the JSON and replaced it with something else. If you don’t add much value then converting between two things is generally straight forward.

I’m struggling not to be unkind… but is their any kind of peer review for this stuff? Do people who understand languages or have a degree of breadth get involved? Do people actually *making* things using this stuff get involved? Because as someone involved in making lots of stuff and running teams making stuff – this misses by miles.

It really doesn’t have to be this way – the community are coming up with better solutions frankly. Bit of a “back to Build” but why the heck didn’t they put some weight behind Farmer – or at least lift some of its ideas (I’m glad they at least acknowledge it). Because here’s a storage account modelled in that:

Here’s a more complex Farmer block for storage and a web app:

Neater right? And typesafe. Its not hard to imagine something inbetween Farmer and Bicep that doesn’t rely on all these strings and bespoke tooling (Farmer is based on F#… so the tooling already exists) but still allows you to dive into things “not in the box”.

Conclusion

Super disappointing. Hopelessly basic. Doesn’t look to solve many problems. Another “requires lots of custom tooling” project. A tiny incremental move on from ARM. Doesn’t seem worth the effort. Better hope the Bicep tooling is good and frequently updated if you plan on using this.

If we’re now “treating ARM as the IL” (which is what it is – despite years of MS pushing back on feedback that ARM is awesome) then this really is a poor effort to build on that. Which is sad because as it comes from Microsoft its likely to become the most commonly used solution. Merit won’t have much to do with it.

If anyone from the Bicep team wants to talk about this – happy to.

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GiottoPress by Enrique Chavez