Today sees the launch of Visual studio 2010, at five launch events around the world, as announced by Bob Muglia, Jason Zander and s. somasegar, and presented live today in Las Vegas. Visual studio 2010 includes the official version 2.0 of the F# language. As is our custom on the F# team, we also release a matching MsI and ZIP of F# 2.0 (for use with Visual studio 2008 and as a standalone compiler on a range of platforms)
Today represents the culmination of 7 years of work on the language at Microsoft Research, and, more recently, the Microsoft Developer Division. I am immensely proud of what we’ve achieved. F# brings a productive functional and object-oriented programming language to .NET, extending the platform to new audiences in technical, algorithmic, data-rich, parallel and explorative domains, and its inclusion in Visual studio 2010 represents a huge milestone for the language.
To help understand what we’re doing with F#, I’ve listed some of the common questions people have about the language below. We thank everyone who has been involved in the production of F#, especially the many users who have given us feedback on the language!