14 DAY TRIAL // The Developer Preview of Visual Studio 11 which Microsoft released at BUILD in mid-September 2011 is also designed to give developers a taste of the next iteration of Visual F#.
In fact, the first pre-Beta release of Visual Studio 11 is the only way to test the F# 3.0 Developer Preview.
Microsoft hasn’t released a standalone Build of F# 3.0 until the time of this article, nor has it indicated that it would do so in the immediate future.
Early adopters looking to start taking advantage of the evolution of F# 3.0 need to head over to MSDN in order to access documentation on the technology.
The “What's New for Visual F# in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview” page is an excellent place to start.
“Visual F# in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview features F# 3.0, which extends the succinct and expressive F# language to support F# information-rich programming. This technology lets you program directly against rich spaces of data and services that often dominate enterprise and web programming today, such as databases, web services, web data feeds and data brokers,” the company reveals.
According to the software giant, there are three types of enhancements that devs will be able to notice in the preview release of F# 3.0.
First off, the Redmond company has worked to add a number of new features designed to kick up a notch the F# Language and Compiler. Developers leveraging the F# 3.0 Preview get new type providers, query expressions and auto-implemented properties.
In addition, the editor and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) have also been improved, with Microsoft stressing that the enhancements are focused on boosting productivity for the developers writing F# code.
Testers also get a number of new features with the latest version of the F# Core Library, detailed on MSDN.
It might be a good idea for developers to also get information on the breaking changes that F# 3.0 introduces.
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is available for download here. Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.