14 DAY TRIAL // A new Community Technology Previews of Microsoft F# is now live on the Microsoft Download Center and available for download to developers. The August 2010 CTP of Microsoft F# went live on the Download Center on August 17th, 2010, delivering another step forward in the evolution of the new language Microsoft developed for the .NET platform.
As is the case with previous CTP releases, the latest development milestone brings to the table the F# compiler and tools.
At the same time, developers can leverage optional Visual Studio integration for their projects that involve F# development.
“The F# August 2010 CTP provides all the tools and resources needed to develop applications with the F# programming language,” Microsoft stated.
“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 company added.
The software giant has always described F# as a functional programming language for.NET. Developers that are already leveraging the latest iteration of VS, are undoubtedly well aware that Microsoft has included F# into Visual Studio 2010.
Luke Hoban, program manager on the F# team at Microsoft, highlighted a few characteristics of F# in a recent talk during TechEd:
“•F# enables exciting new developer scenarios in Visual Studio (explorative bottom-up programming in the F# Interactive);
•F# can leverage many/most of the powerful developer tools in Visual Studio (projects, debugging, editing, help integration, etc.) and .NET (produce and consume vanilla .NET APIs);
•F# has unique strengths in key target domains and extends the .NET platform to these audiences;
•F# scales smoothly from explorative to .NET component development (start with ideas and iteratively and smoothly add structure as methods, types and projects).”
Microsoft F#, August 2010 Community Technology Preview 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.