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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 o

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.
  - willtim 10y ago
    I saw a demo of VS code today, as a Haskell IDE. I was very impressed with what I saw.
- phillipcarter 10y ago
  Here's what I'll say: By sitting the F# language service atop Roslyn Workspaces, F# in Visual Studio is in a far better place infrastructure-wise than it has ever been. Roslyn Workspaces are the lower-level piece that nearly every bit of .NET IDE work is done in. A great example of how that enables F# in other areas is how the idea of support for the Roslyn Project System[0] went from a complete unknown to a reality. The work needed to support F# in various areas went down by orders of magnitude as a result of this work. [0]: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-project-system/pull/1670 https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-project-system/pull/1670 P.S. I'll be in London for a week. Even if you can't make F# Exchange, I'd love to meet up for coffee, beer, or whatever!
mee_too 10y ago
Is F# a good alternative to C# for writing purely object-oriented code? For my current project I have a very low level spec/architecture, that says class Abc does Xyz, classes A1, A2, A3 implement a strategy pattern, etc. It's designed with C#, VB.NET or Java in mind, but the dev team would prefer F# or Scala. One more question. I work at a place with a very restrictive firewall. F# 3 projects worked fine, but with F# 4 the build fails to download nuget packages. Is there a way to use the latest version without Internet connection? I can download anything from microsoft.com, as that site is whitelisted, but nuget.org is not.
- keithnz 10y ago
  you can write an equivalent F# class as any C# class, however, with a spec like that, sounds like it would better off as C#
- phillipcarter 10y ago
  > Is F# a good alternative to C# for writing purely object-oriented code? Yes! F# is perfectly suitable for OO code, and supports all the same features that C# and VB do, plus Object Expressions, which are a really cool way to implement an interface in an ad-hoc way. You can learn more here: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/object-oriented-programming-in-fsharp.html https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/object-oriented-pro... Lots of folks in the F# community would encourage you to adopt a functional pattern (as I would as well), but since so much mindshare in the world is currently surrounding object orientation, I think it's great to use F# for OO code and slowly start to sneak in functional patterns. F# is a very "clean" language in that regard. > One more question. I work at a place with a very restrictive firewall. F# 3 projects worked fine, but with F# 4 the build fails to download nuget packages. Is there a way to use the latest version without Internet connection? I can download anything from microsoft.com, as that site is whitelisted, but nuget.org is not. Hmmmm. You should be able to build F# 4.1 projects in VS 2017 without an internet connection, but it currently does take a dependency on System.ValueTuple to support struct tuples. This is a point-in-time problem that C# shares as well, because System.ValueTuple is not in the .NET Framework yet. It will be in a future .NET Framework release. This shouldn't limit you, though - you can still do anything in-box, just without using struct tuples. Naturally, anything involving NuGet packages will be off-limits in your case. So that does cut you off from some of the awesome community packages out there. Have you considered hosting an internal NuGet feed with a package cache so that you're not limited in this way? A lot of companies do this.
Max_Horstmann 10y ago
Small typo in the post: pubish-directory
- phillipcarter 10y ago
  Thanks! Fixed.
fsloth 10y ago
Hi! Thanks for the update. I love the language but have not followed it closely in a while - what's the current story on compiling F# to native applications?
- phillipcarter 10y ago
  Currently, Mono or IL2CPP.

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.
- willtim 10y ago
  I saw a demo of VS code today, as a Haskell IDE. I was very impressed with what I saw.
phillipcarter 10y ago
Here's what I'll say: By sitting the F# language service atop Roslyn Workspaces, F# in Visual Studio is in a far better place infrastructure-wise than it has ever been. Roslyn Workspaces are the lower-level piece that nearly every bit of .NET IDE work is done in. A great example of how that enables F# in other areas is how the idea of support for the Roslyn Project System[0] went from a complete unknown to a reality. The work needed to support F# in various areas went down by orders of magnitude as a result of this work. [0]: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-project-system/pull/1670 https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-project-system/pull/1670 P.S. I'll be in London for a week. Even if you can't make F# Exchange, I'd love to meet up for coffee, beer, or whatever!

mee_too 10y ago

Is F# a good alternative to C# for writing purely object-oriented code? For my current project I have a very low level spec/architecture, that says class Abc does Xyz, classes A1, A2, A3 implement a strategy pattern, etc. It's designed with C#, VB.NET or Java in mind, but the dev team would prefer F# or Scala. One more question. I work at a place with a very restrictive firewall. F# 3 projects worked fine, but with F# 4 the build fails to download nuget packages. Is there a way to use the latest version without Internet connection? I can download anything from microsoft.com, as that site is whitelisted, but nuget.org is not.

keithnz 10y ago
you can write an equivalent F# class as any C# class, however, with a spec like that, sounds like it would better off as C#
phillipcarter 10y ago
> Is F# a good alternative to C# for writing purely object-oriented code? Yes! F# is perfectly suitable for OO code, and supports all the same features that C# and VB do, plus Object Expressions, which are a really cool way to implement an interface in an ad-hoc way. You can learn more here: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/object-oriented-programming-in-fsharp.html https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/object-oriented-pro... Lots of folks in the F# community would encourage you to adopt a functional pattern (as I would as well), but since so much mindshare in the world is currently surrounding object orientation, I think it's great to use F# for OO code and slowly start to sneak in functional patterns. F# is a very "clean" language in that regard. > One more question. I work at a place with a very restrictive firewall. F# 3 projects worked fine, but with F# 4 the build fails to download nuget packages. Is there a way to use the latest version without Internet connection? I can download anything from microsoft.com, as that site is whitelisted, but nuget.org is not. Hmmmm. You should be able to build F# 4.1 projects in VS 2017 without an internet connection, but it currently does take a dependency on System.ValueTuple to support struct tuples. This is a point-in-time problem that C# shares as well, because System.ValueTuple is not in the .NET Framework yet. It will be in a future .NET Framework release. This shouldn't limit you, though - you can still do anything in-box, just without using struct tuples. Naturally, anything involving NuGet packages will be off-limits in your case. So that does cut you off from some of the awesome community packages out there. Have you considered hosting an internal NuGet feed with a package cache so that you're not limited in this way? A lot of companies do this.

Max_Horstmann 10y ago

Small typo in the post: pubish-directory

phillipcarter 10y ago
Thanks! Fixed.

fsloth 10y ago

Hi! Thanks for the update. I love the language but have not followed it closely in a while - what's the current story on compiling F# to native applications?

phillipcarter 10y ago
Currently, Mono or IL2CPP.