9 ms·

F# 4.1 and Visual F# Tools for Visual Studio 2017

183 points by dustinmoris 10y ago

GiorgioG 10y ago
Sadly VS2017 doesn't support .NET Core F# projects. Come on Microsoft!
- jarnonijboer 10y ago
  F# supports .NET Core projects. VS2017 however doesn't support the new MSBuild syntax which is used for new .NET Core projects. Fortunately this is the goal for the next VS2017 update and the F# community and the MS VF# team, are working hard to get this working. Instead of complaining we, as a community, should be helping the VF# team and contributors with there efforts!
  - thom 10y ago
    I've been enjoying this new push into cross-platform, open source stuff by Microsoft, whereby everything is always broken, incomplete and incompatible.
    - jarnonijboer 10y ago
      Are you talking about F# with .NET Core or .NET Core/Standard in general? If you talk about the latter, I agree with you, that this has been a shit show. However MS is aware of this and Scott Hanselman has complained several times about versioning and other stuff, during the ASP.Net standups, in regarding of (ASP).NET Core in general. I believe that MS is trying their best and since all the open source stuff is new for them as an organization, this an area they are exploring and hopefully learning from there mistakes.
  - douche 10y ago
    They really released VS 2017 without .NET Core support? That seems like a questionable decision, as hyped up as the whole .NET Core push seems to be. Unless they had a mandate to push it out in Q1.
Rapzid 10y ago
Alpha .net core support :( I'm excited things are moving forward, but I wonder how much of the slowness around this is due to the coupling of F# releases with the release cadence of Visual Studio/Visual F# Tools. Hopefully ionide will support dotnet core soon now, and we can get a fully cross-platform development experience with VSCode and .Net Core.
- phillipcarter 10y ago
  Sorry for the confusion, but F# isn't in alpha for .NET Core support. From the post: Specifically, the following are in RC: - FSharp.Core as a .NET Standard NuGet package - The F# compiler running on .NET Core as a .NET Core console application - F# support in the .NET CLI and the .NET Core SDK However, the following are not supported at this time, but will be supported in a future Visual Studio 2017 update: - F# support for .NET Core Visual Studio tooling - F# Interactive (FSI) running on .NET Core as a .NET Core console application
Koshkin 10y ago
F# (and ML in general, despite having been around for a while) looks like a programming language of the future. It occupies just the right place between the two extremes - one being purely functional languages (Haskell, Scheme, etc.) and the other being taken by all sorts of imperative languages (C, PL/1, Java, etc.), which - from a certain standpoint - could all be viewed as derivatives of the assembly language, and which, therefore, should have been long abandoned in favor of languages worthy of the name 'language' as the medium of human thought. (Unfortunately, the two modern languages - Go and Rust, despite showing so much promise, appear, from this perspective, to be following the wrong path.)
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  Rust has a large ML influence from what I've seen. Pattern matching, restricted mutation, sum and product types, and traits immediately come to mind.
  - saghm 10y ago
    Are traits really an ML thing? To me, they seem more similar to Haskell's typeclasses (and by "more similar to", I mean "almost exactly the same thing as"). From my somewhat limited experience with OCaml, it seems like the closest thing it has to traits is modules/functors, which seem to work fairly differently (i.e. traits are "added" to existing types, whereas functors are used to create new types).
    - drivebyops 10y ago
      Yep traits are definitely like typeclasses. Well F# might get it when Shapes gets into C# (C# version of traits/typeclasses which is being discussed)
- alkonaut 10y ago
  Rust is very much ML. It's the systems programming token salad that makes it look like C++, but if you squint you can see it looks a lot like ML. As does swift.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
phillipcarter 10y ago
Author of the post here. Happy to answer any questions you may have! Edit: Just to reiterate, the releases described in the blog post have an immense amount of community sweat behind them. We're super happy about how engaged the F# community is and proud to have such a long section dedicated to attribution. If you want to learn more about F# or get started, try any of the following: * http://fsharp.org/ http://fsharp.org/ * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/getting-started/getting-started-visual-studio https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto... * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/getting-started/getting-started-vscode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto... * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/getting-started/getting-started-command-line https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto... * Visual Studio for Mac (comes with F#): https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/
- saulr 10y ago
  Hey Philip, great post - really informative. Especially happy to see that the nightly releases are coming along considering the pace of improvements by the likes of Vasily and all the rest. I do have a small question about the Visual F# team at Microsoft. Are there any plans to grow the team at all? It seems that the company deems F# as a second class .Net language, preferring VB.Net/C# when it comes to contributions from employees and IDE features. Given the popularity of F# in surveys such as the recent annual Stack Overflow developers survey, is there any interest at the company to put more manpower to F# development? P.S. I hope to see you around at the F# Exchange in London next month if I go.
  - danielvf 10y ago
    Microsoft's language roadmap list F# as their third most important language: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-language-strategy/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-l... But I wouldn't judge too much based on team size - the Visual Studio Code team is very small, and yet has an incredible velocity and quality.
lilactown 10y ago
Is there a good, cross-platform UI framework for F#?
- phillipcarter 10y ago
  This may not be quite the direct answer you expect, but yes there are multiple ways to create cross-platform UIs with F#: 1. Xamarin[0]. It supports F# for everything aside from UWP targets. 2. WinForms on Mono[1]. 3. FABLE[2] to compile your F# into JavaScript. It's a very good tool and it produces really nice JavaScript as well. From there, you can run the code on the web, Electron, or React Native[3]. [0]: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/fsharp/fsharp_support_overview/ https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/fsharp/f... [1]: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ [2]: http://fable.io/ http://fable.io/ [3]: https://github.com/fable-compiler/fable-react https://github.com/fable-compiler/fable-react
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I am struggling to understand why xamarin supports F# but not VB...
    - nickpeterson 10y ago
      I believe it has more to do with the founder being an F# enthusiast and less to do with marketshare or suitability.
  - Zolomon 10y ago
    Worth mentioning is that System.Drawing on Mono is more or less crippled, at least on macOS.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  Eto.Forms and also XWT are good choices.
- Nelkins 10y ago
  AvaloniaUI looks like a good choice. The demos shown in the README are impressive[1]. [1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
hacker_9 10y ago
Great to hear the move to Roslyn is complete! Last time I used F# I was suprised at the lack of IDE features compared to C#, so I look forward to trying out the improved experience.
- jarnonijboer 10y ago
  VF# now uses the Roslyn Workspaces, however the migration to the new Roslyn ProjectSystem is just started ;)
nbevans 10y ago
Is there any news on when .NET Native's stupid AOT compiler (i.e. UWP store apps) will support F#? It is becoming scandalous now. We have a circa 800k LOC F# Xamarin codebase working on iOS and Android but cannot spin up the UWP variant for this reason.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

183 points by dustinmoris 10y ago

GiorgioG 10y ago

Sadly VS2017 doesn't support .NET Core F# projects. Come on Microsoft!

jarnonijboer 10y ago
F# supports .NET Core projects. VS2017 however doesn't support the new MSBuild syntax which is used for new .NET Core projects. Fortunately this is the goal for the next VS2017 update and the F# community and the MS VF# team, are working hard to get this working. Instead of complaining we, as a community, should be helping the VF# team and contributors with there efforts!
- thom 10y ago
  I've been enjoying this new push into cross-platform, open source stuff by Microsoft, whereby everything is always broken, incomplete and incompatible.
  - jarnonijboer 10y ago
    Are you talking about F# with .NET Core or .NET Core/Standard in general? If you talk about the latter, I agree with you, that this has been a shit show. However MS is aware of this and Scott Hanselman has complained several times about versioning and other stuff, during the ASP.Net standups, in regarding of (ASP).NET Core in general. I believe that MS is trying their best and since all the open source stuff is new for them as an organization, this an area they are exploring and hopefully learning from there mistakes.
- douche 10y ago
  They really released VS 2017 without .NET Core support? That seems like a questionable decision, as hyped up as the whole .NET Core push seems to be. Unless they had a mandate to push it out in Q1.

Rapzid 10y ago

Alpha .net core support :( I'm excited things are moving forward, but I wonder how much of the slowness around this is due to the coupling of F# releases with the release cadence of Visual Studio/Visual F# Tools. Hopefully ionide will support dotnet core soon now, and we can get a fully cross-platform development experience with VSCode and .Net Core.

phillipcarter 10y ago
Sorry for the confusion, but F# isn't in alpha for .NET Core support. From the post: Specifically, the following are in RC: - FSharp.Core as a .NET Standard NuGet package - The F# compiler running on .NET Core as a .NET Core console application - F# support in the .NET CLI and the .NET Core SDK However, the following are not supported at this time, but will be supported in a future Visual Studio 2017 update: - F# support for .NET Core Visual Studio tooling - F# Interactive (FSI) running on .NET Core as a .NET Core console application

Koshkin 10y ago

F# (and ML in general, despite having been around for a while) looks like a programming language of the future. It occupies just the right place between the two extremes - one being purely functional languages (Haskell, Scheme, etc.) and the other being taken by all sorts of imperative languages (C, PL/1, Java, etc.), which - from a certain standpoint - could all be viewed as derivatives of the assembly language, and which, therefore, should have been long abandoned in favor of languages worthy of the name 'language' as the medium of human thought. (Unfortunately, the two modern languages - Go and Rust, despite showing so much promise, appear, from this perspective, to be following the wrong path.)

jjnoakes 10y ago
Rust has a large ML influence from what I've seen. Pattern matching, restricted mutation, sum and product types, and traits immediately come to mind.
- saghm 10y ago
  Are traits really an ML thing? To me, they seem more similar to Haskell's typeclasses (and by "more similar to", I mean "almost exactly the same thing as"). From my somewhat limited experience with OCaml, it seems like the closest thing it has to traits is modules/functors, which seem to work fairly differently (i.e. traits are "added" to existing types, whereas functors are used to create new types).
  - drivebyops 10y ago
    Yep traits are definitely like typeclasses. Well F# might get it when Shapes gets into C# (C# version of traits/typeclasses which is being discussed)
alkonaut 10y ago
Rust is very much ML. It's the systems programming token salad that makes it look like C++, but if you squint you can see it looks a lot like ML. As does swift.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

phillipcarter 10y ago

Author of the post here. Happy to answer any questions you may have! Edit: Just to reiterate, the releases described in the blog post have an immense amount of community sweat behind them. We're super happy about how engaged the F# community is and proud to have such a long section dedicated to attribution. If you want to learn more about F# or get started, try any of the following: * http://fsharp.org/ http://fsharp.org/ * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/getting-started/getting-started-visual-studio https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto... * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/getting-started/getting-started-vscode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto... * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tutorials/getting-started/getting-started-command-line https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/fsharp/tuto... * Visual Studio for Mac (comes with F#): https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/

saulr 10y ago
Hey Philip, great post - really informative. Especially happy to see that the nightly releases are coming along considering the pace of improvements by the likes of Vasily and all the rest. I do have a small question about the Visual F# team at Microsoft. Are there any plans to grow the team at all? It seems that the company deems F# as a second class .Net language, preferring VB.Net/C# when it comes to contributions from employees and IDE features. Given the popularity of F# in surveys such as the recent annual Stack Overflow developers survey, is there any interest at the company to put more manpower to F# development? P.S. I hope to see you around at the F# Exchange in London next month if I go.
- danielvf 10y ago
  Microsoft's language roadmap list F# as their third most important language: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-language-strategy/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/02/01/the-net-l... But I wouldn't judge too much based on team size - the Visual Studio Code team is very small, and yet has an incredible velocity and quality.

lilactown 10y ago

Is there a good, cross-platform UI framework for F#?

phillipcarter 10y ago
This may not be quite the direct answer you expect, but yes there are multiple ways to create cross-platform UIs with F#: 1. Xamarin[0]. It supports F# for everything aside from UWP targets. 2. WinForms on Mono[1]. 3. FABLE[2] to compile your F# into JavaScript. It's a very good tool and it produces really nice JavaScript as well. From there, you can run the code on the web, Electron, or React Native[3]. [0]: https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/fsharp/fsharp_support_overview/ https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/fsharp/f... [1]: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/gui/winforms/ [2]: http://fable.io/ http://fable.io/ [3]: https://github.com/fable-compiler/fable-react https://github.com/fable-compiler/fable-react
- cm2187 10y ago
  I am struggling to understand why xamarin supports F# but not VB...
  - nickpeterson 10y ago
    I believe it has more to do with the founder being an F# enthusiast and less to do with marketshare or suitability.
- Zolomon 10y ago
  Worth mentioning is that System.Drawing on Mono is more or less crippled, at least on macOS.
hacker_9 10y ago
Eto.Forms and also XWT are good choices.
Nelkins 10y ago
AvaloniaUI looks like a good choice. The demos shown in the README are impressive[1]. [1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

hacker_9 10y ago

Great to hear the move to Roslyn is complete! Last time I used F# I was suprised at the lack of IDE features compared to C#, so I look forward to trying out the improved experience.

jarnonijboer 10y ago
VF# now uses the Roslyn Workspaces, however the migration to the new Roslyn ProjectSystem is just started ;)

nbevans 10y ago

Is there any news on when .NET Native's stupid AOT compiler (i.e. UWP store apps) will support F#? It is becoming scandalous now. We have a circa 800k LOC F# Xamarin codebase working on iOS and Android but cannot spin up the UWP variant for this reason.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]