F# values displaying strangely in notebooks

[bmitc]

Describe the bug

In general, I have found that F# is now displaying values strangely in VS Code. I feel that it didn't used to be this way, so maybe I missed a feature change or it's possible that this is a regression.

For example, see the following screenshot:

For the most part, I am now usually defining a helper function let print value = printfn "%A" value and piping any output into print to get reasonable and readable displays of values.

Please complete the following:

Which version of .NET Interactive are you using? (In a notebook, run the #!about magic command. ):

• OS
  • [x] Windows 11
  • [ ] Windows 10
  • [ ] macOS
  • [ ] Linux (Please specify distro)
  • [ ] iOS
  • [ ] Android
• Browser
  • [ ] Chrome
  • [ ] Edge
  • [ ] Firefox
  • [ ] Safari
• Frontend
  • [ ] Jupyter Notebook
  • [ ] Jupyter Lab
  • [ ] nteract
  • [x] Visual Studio Code
  • [ ] Visual Studio Code Insiders
  • [ ] Visual Studio
  • [ ] Other (please specify)

Screenshots

See above. Also, here's version information:

[nhirschey]

Just an FYI, rather than printfn "%A" you can change the default output to the FSI formatter using the trick from https://github.com/dotnet/interactive/issues/1282

Formatter.SetPreferredMimeTypeFor(typeof<obj>, "text/plain")
Formatter.Register(fun (x:obj) (writer: TextWriter) -> fprintfn writer "%120A" x )

A downside is that it will break any libraries with their own interactive printing, such as Plotly.NET, but you can fix those with for example

// Make plotly graphs work with interactive plaintext formatter
Formatter.SetPreferredMimeTypesFor(typeof<GenericChart.GenericChart>,"text/html")