14 DAY TRIAL // Along with the Release Candidate builds of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 that Microsoft made available to the public on February 10, 2010, the company also released a new development milestone for Microsoft F#. The February 2010 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft F# went live on the Microsoft Download Center on the same day as VS 2010 RC and .NET 4 RC.
“The F# February 2010 CTP provides all the tools and resources needed to develop applications with the F# programming language,” Microsoft noted. “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.”
Early adopters that have followed the evolution of Visual Studio and F# already know that the two technologies are intimately connected. S. Somasegar, senior vice president, Developer Division revealed back in October 2009 that Visual Studio 2010 was the first version of the company’s development platform that directly supported functional programming. This is, of course, possible through the F# programming language. Via the release on the Microsoft Download Center, developers will be able to access not only the F# compiler and tools, but also the optional Visual Studio 2008 integration for F# development.
“F# is a multiple-paradigm programming language for the .NET Framework that is available in Visual Studio 2010. F# supports functional programming, object-oriented programming, and imperative programming,” Microsoft stated. The company also enumerated some of the features that the Visual Studio 2010 Release of Visual F# brings to the table, including: support for functional programming, lambda expressions, immutable data types, pattern matching, asynchronous and parallel programming, interactive programming, delayed computations, support for object oriented programming, support for imperative programming, support for mathematical calculations, etc.
Microsoft F#, February 2010 Community Technology Preview is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.