14 DAY TRIAL // A new Community Technology Preview development milestone of Microsoft F# was made available to developers the past week. According to Bruce D. Kyle, ISV Architect Evangelist, Microsoft, the focus with the delivery of the August 2010 CTP for F# was the expansion of support in terms of interoperability.
The F# team released the August 2010 update of the F# 2.0 as a free download, in two flavors, a MSI and a ZIP package respectively.
“This release enables .NET 4.0 development with the MSI and ZIP releases of F# 2.0. This is an important release for the F# community, as it extends the existing availability of free-for-use F# programming tools to .NET 4.0,” explained Microsoft’s Don Syme.
With the latest refresh of Microsoft F#, the Redmond company has worked to expand support for Visual Studio.
“With this release, the MSI installer can now be used to install F# in concert with the freely available Visual Studio 2010 Shell (integrated mode),” Syme added.
“This extends the existing support for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 Shell from previous releases.”
In order to integrate Microsoft F# with.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Shell on Windows, developers will need to first make sure that Visual Studio 2010 Shell (integrated mode) is installed.
Subsequently they will also need to deploy the F# 2.0 August 2010 MSI, the software giant explained.
“Other installation options are explained on the F# developer center, for example, the latest F# MSI and ZIP releases can install as a standalone compiler + libraries,” Syme stated.
“These releases can be used with any CLI implementation, including .NET (Windows) and Mono (Linux/Mac). We recommend users of F# on Mono/Linux/Mac update to this release.”
It is important to underline that Microsoft has already labored to include F# into the latest iteration of its development platform.
In this context, devs leveraging Visual Studio 2010 Professional or Ultimate do not actually need the Microsoft F# August CTP update, since the technology is already included in their development platform.
Microsoft F#, August 2010 Community Technology Preview is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.