Another great week in F#. Most importantly, it is now known that the language will continue to be available for free, despite productization. Also, the F# PowerPack is now available for VS2010 beta and the MSDN documentation is up.
Tore Green asks Don Syme “will F# continue to be freely available?”
Free options will continue to exist, most likely through the VS shell. For example, we'll be continuing with our VS2008 plugin until the plans around a VS2010 shell finalize.
It is very good to hear that the productization of F# won’t stop it from continuing to be available for free.
Tomas Petricek’s WebCast – Using Asynchronous Workflows
Now that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is out, it is finally a good time to take a look at one of the (in my opinion) most interesting new features in the new release - the F# language.
In this Webcast, Tomas shows how simple it is to add asynchronous operation to an application via the F# asynchronous workflow feature.
F# PowerPack Beta 1 for .NET 4.0/Visual Studio 2010 is Available.
F# PowerPack is now available for download for the latest Beta development milestones of the next generation of Microsoft's development platform and tools.
I know a great many people (not to mention myself) were disappointed that the VS 2010 beta did not ship with this. I for one am in love with it’s Math and Charting features.
Visual F# MSDN Documentation
The Visual F# product provides support for developing F# applications or extending other .NET applications with F# code.
We now have official documentation in the MSDN style we all know and love.
F# – You can overload operators, but you can’t use them.
^ (op_Concatenate): Compiler error in F#. Apparently only strings can be concatenated.
> (op_GreaterThan): Runtime Error – Failure during generic comparison: the type Program+OppTest4 does not implement the System.IComparable interface.
It’s not what you say but how you say it, and while I feel the reaction of the author was way over the top, his concerns seem justified. I’m hoping it’s just a bug and, now being identified, will be resolved.