I have been playing with F# quite a lot recently and to be honest I started to really like it. Besides the fact that F# is a very powerful language it is a lot of fun too! As a result I began to migrate one of my smaller web services from C# and ASP.NET MVC 5 to F# and NancyFx. Nancy as a .NET web framework works perfectly fine with any .NET language, but has certainly not been written with F# much in mind. While it works really well in C#, it can feel quite clunky with F# at some times. There are other web frameworks which are more idiomatic, but come with other tradeoffs instead.

However, when I started to migrate from C# to NancyFx and F# I had quite some difficulties to implement even the simplest things in the beginning. Asynchronous routes were one of those things. The fact that I am an F# beginner didn't help either. Unfortunately there is not a lot of documentation on NancyFx with F# available and therefore I thought I'd share some of my own examples in this blog post.

As I said before, some of the stuff is really simple and probably super easy for an experienced F# developer, but for me as a beginner it was not that obvious in the beginning.

A great start on NancyFx and F# is Michal Franc's blog post, where he shows how to register a normal route in NancyFx with F#:

type MyModule() as this =
    inherit NancyModule()
    do this.Get.["/"] <- fun ctx ->
        "Hello World" :> obj

This code is not much different from the equivalent C# implementation. MyModule inherits from the base NancyModule class and assigns a function to the root path of the HTTP GET verb. The only difference between C# and F# is that I had to explicitly upcast the string value to an object to match the method's expected signature.

Registering an asynchronous route is slightly different. The function expects an additional input parameter for the cancellation token and returns a Task or Task<T> object instead:

do this.Get.["/foo", true] <- fun ctx ct ->
    Task.FromResult("bar" :> obj)

This simple example works, but is not asynchronous, because Task.FromResult blocks on the current thread. What I really want to do is to call an asynchronous workflow from F# and execute it from an asynchronous route in NancyFx.

Asynchronous workflows in F# are different from Tasks in C# and therefore need to be converted from an Async<'T> object into a Task<T> in NancyFx.

Luckily the .NET Control.Async class offers plenty of predefined methods to make the translation very easy.

With Async.RunSynchronously one can convert an async workflow into a C# Task and execute it on the current thread synchronously:

do this.Get.["/foo"] <- fun ctx ct ->
  async {
      return "bar" :> obj
  }
  |> Async.RunSynchronously

This works, but it is still not asynchronous. If you want to run the async workflow in a non-blocking fashion in Nancy then you can pipe it to Async.StartAsTask which runs it asynchronously and returns a completed task:

do this.Get.["/foo", true] <- fun ctx ct ->
  async {
      return "bar" :> obj
  }
  |> Async.StartAsTask

In every case I had to upcast the string value to an object to match the expected return type. The Async class is full of useful functions which can run and convert asynchronous workflows from F# to C# and vice-versa.

If you are building a Nancy application in F# then you might also be interested in Fancy or Tiny Blue Robots' blog post, where both show some neat tricks on how to make Nancy feel a bit more functional.

With this I am going back to my F# work and wish everyone a happy F# day!