14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has created a cozy online nook for F# programmers on MSDN, launching a new forum. Visual F# General is already live and ready to receive feedback and catalyze interaction among those developers that use the programming language.
According to the official description of the new forum, it’s designed as a hub to centralize “general discussion and questions regarding Visual F# -- including best practices on developing with F# in VS with functional and object oriented programming, documentation, setup, and samples.”
Don Syme, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge explained that the forum comes as a response from the software giant to the growing number of MSDN members that have embraced F#.
“We’re adding an MSDN form to the F# community mix because we know that a large proportion of the F# community strongly associate with the MSDN community and want F# to have a high presence amongst MSDN developers,” Syme said.
Earlier this year, the Redmond company kicked up a notch the F# 2.0 Free Tools Release, an update designed to reflect the release of the first service pack for Visual Studio 2010, but a small refresh at best.
“Many of you will probably be saying "what took you so long!" Well, F# has several existing great forums, particularly hubfs, IRC and stackoverflow. These are the lynchpins of the F# community, and we very much expect this to continue to be the case,” Syme said.
“We particularly want to take this opportunity to highlight all the work done by Chris Barwick in running the hubfs site over the years. F# is a really open effort with a really active community, and community leaders such as Chris and others have created a wealth of online community presence, interaction and content. These and many other community members will, I’m sure, also be dropping by the new forums too.”
Microsoft F#, April 2011 Community Technology Preview is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.