Why F#?

For the development of ADS Toolkit I have considered two .NET based languages, F# due to Type Providers, and Nemrele due to powerful metaprogramming capabilities. Unfortunately Nemerle, which is great language, I strongly encourage you to try it, lacks mature support in Visual Studio.

Let’s focus on few F# features that’ll be useful for this particular project.

Type aliases

As mentioned in previous post, TwinCAT implements IEC 61131-3 specification, thus data types naming is different from the one we know from .NET world.  Type aliases are a little thing, yet they make communication a lot simpler, due to allowing both parties (.NET Dev and PLC Dev) usage of same naming convention. Besides, it’s easier, and faster, to say double word instead of  32bit unsigned integer.

Units of Measure and strong typing

Yet another little thing, but it makes values less abstract, plus it makes types safe, if by any chance we’ll by trying to add, or compare,  A (current) to V (voltage) we’ll end up with compile time error. Also, typical solution involves precise measurement thus F# lack of dynamic casting between numeric is another plus.

Type providers

An F# type provider is a component that provides types, properties, and methods for use in your program. – MSDN

I want to skip as much manual work as possible when creating software, call me lazy, thus major part of this project is providing types, required to communicate with PLC, based on *.tpy file generated by TwinCAT.

F# itself

On a first few projects in area of Industrial Automation I used C# exclusively, but recently, say one year ago, I decided to take my chances and try F# for the part of solution responsible for communication with PLC, LIN (Local Interconnect Network – an Automotive network) systems and third party web service. Since that time I cannot imagine myself using non-functional language for such appliances. Time required for development was at least cut 40%, moreover I wasn’t distracted by expressive C-like syntax. As a side note, code metrics is way shorter, yet it’s not a valid criterion to judge software.

Testing

AppVeyor

I always wanted to give those fancy hosted CI build servers a shot. I picked AppVeyor as it’s free for OSS projects (same as Travis-CI), comes with nice badges (again, same as Travis-CI) and is Windows based. Later, if I get to the point at which I replace Beckhoff’s TwinCAT.Ads.dll with own, fully managed .NET client, I’ll be testing it on mono/linux.

FoQ, AutoFixture, xUnit, FsUnit

I admit, I used none of them before, only nUnit, MSTest and JustMock, no wonder I want to try something different, although JustMock has some nice features. DSP is great moment to try new tools, and I’m curious if xUnit is as much extensible as it is described, if AutoFixture saves as much time as its authors boast, and moreover, how all of them play together.

Why I’ll need mocking

As said earlier, I’ll be using AppVeyor, hosted CI build server. It means I can forget about testing against actual TwinCAT instance, whether VM or actual PLC, adding routes to running TwinCAT instance can sometimes be pain in the ass, and I don’t want to check how it can be done on AppVeyor, it probably can’t be done anyway. I’m going to wrap TcAdsClient in  my class (and mock it for test). It’s always good idea to create wrapper for TcAdsClient anyway, as AdsException does not contain information regarding on which particular symbolic/handle operation has failed.