14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, Microsoft released F# runtime for the latest iteration of Silverlight. F# on Silverlight 4 was made available to developers as part of Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. Devs already familiar with the Silverlight tools for VS know that the Redmond company has worked to centralize a range of development resources in a single package simplifying the creation of Silverlight projects under Visual Studio 2010. Following the delivery of F# on Silverlight 4, the Redmond company also offered an update to the F# PowerPack, tailoring the release to both Silverlight 3 and 4.
“We release a new version of F# PowerPack - an open-source collection of libraries and tools for use with F# programming language provided by F# team at Microsoft. Starting from this release, F# PowerPack installation includes PowerPack libraries built for Silverlight 3 and 4. Other changes in the release are bugfixes,” Microsoft’s Dmitry Lomov reveals.
F# version 2.0 was finalized and released concomitantly with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. Of course, this should be of no surprise to early adopters that followed the evolution of Visual Studio, as Microsoft simply kept its promise to integrate F# into the latest version of the development platform. But, while Visual Studio 2010 does include the official version 2.0 of the F# language, the F# PowerPack is designed to bring some extra resources to the table.
Namely to deliver “functionality which is not part of the core F# release, but enables some development scenarios with F#. The PowerPack include features such as a basic Matrix library and supporting math types, FsLex and FsYacc tools for lexing and parsing, support for using F# with LINQ-based libraries, and a tool for generating HTML documentation from F# libraries. This functionality, which has previously been available in the F# CTP releases, is now available on CodePlex. The F# PowerPack will continue to evolve separately from the main F# releases, and the features will continue to be improved and iterated upon,” an excerpt of the F# PowerPack’s description reads.
The F# PowerPack is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RTM are available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Build 4.0.50401.0 RTW 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.