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Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

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Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#2
I'm probably the minority here, as I'm a visual thinker. But when I see "Visual" in the headline and click on it. The first thing I want to see is something visual (I understand it's a product name). But on this post, everything above the fold is just text which I don't want to read.

I'm actually very curious about F# and anything functional these days, however, aesthetically was turned off for some reason.

Show me your best feature upfront and then I'll want to read more.

update: Looks like the moderator or the OP changed the headline to something more appropriate. So my comment is less relevant now.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#3

I'm probably the minority here, as I'm a visual thinker. But when I see "Visual" in the headline and click on it. The first thing I want to see is something visual (I understand it's a product name). But on this post, everything above the fold is just text which I don't want to read. I'm actually very curious about F# and anything functional these days, however, aesthetically was turned off for some reason. Show me y…

They aren't trying to sell you on something. It's a community run project (in fact it is a guest post not even by Microsoft themselves).

I don't think there is one magical screenshot that can sum it up. If you take 1s to scroll down you can see screenshots of each individual feature. This is just complaining for complaining's sake.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#4

I'm probably the minority here, as I'm a visual thinker. But when I see "Visual" in the headline and click on it. The first thing I want to see is something visual (I understand it's a product name). But on this post, everything above the fold is just text which I don't want to read. I'm actually very curious about F# and anything functional these days, however, aesthetically was turned off for some reason. Show me y…

So far as I know, nothing under the Microsoft "Visual" brand name has ever supported visual programming as such; it's all always been text-based source and other normal IDE stuff. The most visual part would probably be the drop-down menus you get with tab-completion in the editor.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#5
I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of what I was complaining about, it looks like the F# community has addressed. I'll be looking for ways to go back and play with it.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#6
post #4

I'm probably the minority here, as I'm a visual thinker. But when I see "Visual" in the headline and click on it. The first thing I want to see is something visual (I understand it's a product name). But on this post, everything above the fold is just text which I don't want to read. I'm actually very curious about F# and anything functional these days, however, aesthetically was turned off for some reason. Show me y…

So far as I know, nothing under the Microsoft "Visual" brand name has ever supported visual programming as such; it's all always been text-based source and other normal IDE stuff. The most visual part would probably be the drop-down menus you get with tab-completion in the editor.

References the visual GUI editors

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#7

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#8
It's great that the community is stepping up to provide this functionality, but most of these features are things that I'm very surprised that the default tooling from MS doesn't already provide. No rename at all? No find references? I was led to believe that the VS tooling for F# was actually pretty good but those two are very basic things I expect from an IDE, especially for a static language.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#9

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

Been using C# for a while now for shrinkwrapped winforms database application and web site. We started intermixing F# in the last year. I've found F# to be better than C# in everything except a few fringe cases where libraries have done things specific to C#.

For example, F# has a better ORM framework than anything in C# with Type Providers.... unless you need to support two databases in the same dll. Then when trying to use nHibernate, we found that Nhibernate mappings expect virtual properties, which F# didn't easily do. So we have a C# project with a few C# classes used by the ORM, then a conversion layer into F# domain objects, which we would've done anyway, because ORM classes are terrible at expressing the domain compared to F# records and unions.

Other than a few weirdnesses like that, we've found it to be great and otherwise a drop in replacement for C#.

Re: Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio

#10

I'm a long-time C# developer, and several years ago tried out F# for a project for which it seemed like a reasonable fit. However, after a month or so, I switched back to C#. I missed the very strong type inference of F# and pattern matching, and C# suddenly seemed very verbose and awkward to me. But C#'s tooling was just head and shoulders ahead of F#, and that made a huge difference in my productivity. But most of…

I'm also a long time C# developer and I would love to try out F#. what types of projects is F# really good for? Any cool open source projects that you'd recommend?

I find F# to be really great for scripty things. Honestly, it's more of a Python replacement than C# for me.

I've scripted Google Maps scraping using F#. It doesn't showcase any particularly functional features, but you can see there is very little code (relative to C#) in order to accomplish what I needed. [0]

P/Invoke works well, too. I've called native Windows APIs to audit user-mode and kernel-mode memory usage. [1]

The last project generates a Mandelbrot image in parallel. It's as easy as `Array.Parallel.init` on line #81! [2]

[0] https://github.com/ChadSki/MapMaker/blob/master/MapMaker/Pro...

[1] https://github.com/ChadSki/RamCensus/blob/master/RamCensusFs...

[2] https://github.com/ChadSki/FSharpMandelbrot/blob/master/FSha...

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