Microsoft Announces F# Integration Into Visual Studio

[rdrake]

From the article:

Quote:

Microsoft has announced that support for the F# functional programming language will be fully integrated into Visual Studio. This marks a bold new commitment to facilitating functional programming on the .NET platform and could potentially help legitimize functional programming in enterprise environments. Microsoft's promotion of F# to a fully-supported language in Visual Studio is also indicative of the extreme versatility of the .NET platform and Microsoft's Common Language Runtime.

I'm happy. Could probably start writing some libraries in F# .

[Euphoracle]

Microsoft seems to be taking a lot of "for the community" approaches lately. Like the viewable sourcecode to .NET3, this, what's next?

Good thing to, since Microsoft dominates the market, it's good to see them expanding as a more "likable" company.

[haskell]

If they'd stop lobbying against open source and take part in it with their programming tools, they'd see their tools on other platforms without them having to pay anything. I mean, if Microsoft put .NET and related technologies open sourced, it would likely be ported by week's end, and would be a lot more popular. Thus opening up for Visual Studio sales geared at the *nix and OSX developers, which is likely a much larger audience than Windows only.

[Euphoracle]

That and the fact that I want VS2005 on every platform with plugins for every language >

[rdrake]

haskell @ Wed Oct 24, 2007 5:24 am wrote:

If they'd stop lobbying against open source and take part in it with their programming tools, they'd see their tools on other platforms without them having to pay anything.

*Cough* They already announced that. *cough*

haskell @ Wed Oct 24, 2007 5:24 am wrote:

I mean, if Microsoft put .NET and related technologies open sourced, it would likely be ported by week's end, and would be a lot more popular. Thus opening up for Visual Studio sales geared at the *nix and OSX developers, which is likely a much larger audience than Windows only.

They're working together with the folks working on Moonlight to bring Silverlight to Linux. The DLR is also being ported to Linux and such via the Mono project because it's open source.

haskell @ Wed Oct 24, 2007 5:24 am wrote:

Thus opening up for Visual Studio sales geared at the *nix and OSX developers, which is likely a much larger audience than Windows only.

I'd be shocked if any *nix developers or even users would want to use Visual Studio being from Microsoft and all (except md!). OS X, no idea. I know people who keep a separate Windows partition on their Mac just so they can use Visual Studio.

[wtd]

OS X users have Xcode, and VS gets them nothing over Xcode except for Windows programming.