New F# CTP Released

A new development milestone of F# was offered to developers just a few days ahead of the official launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4. The April 2010 Community Technology Preview of F# is currently available through the Microsoft Download Center. Early adopters that have already test-driven F# know that Microsoft aims to deliver a productive, typed functional and object-oriented language tailored specifically to the .NET platform. According to Microsoft, the latest CTP release of F3 brings to the table the compiler and tools, and is designed to allow developers leveraging Visual Studio 2008 to integrate F# development.

“The F# April 2010 CTP provides all the tools and resources needed to develop applications with the F# programming language. It is available as an MSI for use with .NET and Visual Studio, and as a ZIP for use with other CLI implementations and platforms, including .NET Compact Framework on Xbox 360, and Mono on Mac, Linux and other platforms,” the Redmond company noted.

The F# language has now been in development for over four years. It was in February 2010, with the previous CTP release, that Microsoft kicked up a notch the product version for the language, to 2.0. Of course, the evolution of F# from version 1.x to 2.0, in combination with its success in terms of dev adoption, has made it into a first-class language in Visual Studio 2010.

“F# is a functional programming language for the .NET Framework. It combines the succinct, expressive and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET,” Microsoft added. “F# is well suited to a spectrum of development tasks - from interactive, explorative scripting to component and large-scale software development. The CTP release of F# provides further support for explorative development using F#, as well as improved Visual Studio integration to enable large-scale, tool-based software development.”

Microsoft F#, April 2010 Community Technology Preview is available for download here.