14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available for download a new development milestone of the F# language. The Microsoft Download Center is now offering a fresh Community Technology Preview of F#, which is available free of charge, just as it was the case with all the previous releases of the technology.
Developers already familiar with F# preview Builds undoubtedly know what to expect from the April 2011 CTP released on April 21st, 2011, namely the compiler and associated tools.
“The F# April 2011 CTP provides all the tools and resources needed to develop applications with the F# programming language,” Microsoft explained.
“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.”
It’s now been over a month since Microsoft introduced Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010, providing developers with new features and capabilities to leverage in their applications.
Devs have been able to download Visual Studio 2010 SP1 RTM since March 11, 2011, and even earlier if they were MSDN subscribers.
The launch of Visual Studio 2010 RTM brought with it support functional programming for the first time in VS, and of course, F# is responsible for this.
“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,” the company 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 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.