You would be forgiven if you thought the "F" in F# -- which made its debut as part of Visual Studio 2010 -- stands for "functional." After all, F# (pronounced "F sharp") is a functional programming language for the .NET Framework that combines the succinct, expressive, and compositional style of functional programming with the runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object model of .NET.
But Don Syme, inventor of F# and leader of the team that incubated the language, has a different, truncated, and entirely whimsical definition.
"In the F# team," says Syme, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, "We say, 'F is for Fun.' F# enables users to write simple code to solve complex problems. Programming with F# really does make many programming tasks simpler, and our users have consistently reported that they've found using the language enjoyable."
Indeed, F#, which has been developed in a partnership between Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Developer Division, is already popular with the .NET developer community. The language is widely known in the academic community and among thought leaders, and the list of admirers will only increase as Visual F#, the result of a partnership between Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft's Developer Division, becomes a first-class language in Visual Studio 2010.
Andrey Karpov on 12 Nov 12Visual Studio provides very powerful capabilities for us to extend its functional using various technologies and approaches. You can both automate routine actions using simplest macros and carry out a deep integration of any third-party or your own user components. In fact, while extending Visual Studio, you are limited only by your own imagination, so you can realize such eccentric solutions as integration of your favorite Instant Messenger client into the project window, or even an "achievements for developers" ( http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bc7a433b-b594-48d4-bba2-a2f24774d02f ) system like in videogames! After all, any serious developer must know and be able to adjust the development environment to his/her own needs, as well as be able to handle its possible "glitches". At the same time, creating extensions is nowadays simple and transparent as never before, regardless of your previous experience of working with Visual Studio! You can both integrate a native library module that will be able to directly handle the low-level COM interfaces of the API environment, and a managed build that will have an access to almost all of these APIs through convenient managed wraps. While the native unit will surely provide the developer with the absolute control over the situation, using managed builds for extensions will help you get rid of a very complicated process of calculating the number of COM-objects instances and direct memory handling, allowing you to focus on implementing the functionality you need with all the power .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime can provide. If you've got interested in the subject of extending Visual Studio, you can try it right now starting with 3 simple steps described in this article. This guide will allow you to create a completely functional managed extension module for all the Visual Studio versions literally within 10 minutes and start using your functional at once, while the rest articles of this series
