The F# team is excited to announce that F# Tools for Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web is now available! Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web (available here) is a free development environment that programmers can use to build projects such as ASP.NET applications and Windows Azure cloud services. This F# Tools release adds in F# 3.0 components, such as the F# 3.0 compiler, F# Interactive, IDE support, and new F# features such as type providers and query expressions. Note: if you already have Visual Studio [...]

The "Cloud Numerics" Lab from SQL Azure Labs has been refreshed. To quote the Cloud Numerics Team: Today we are announcing a refresh of the Microsoft Codename "Cloud Numerics" Lab. We want to thank everyone who participated in the initial Lab, we listened to your feedback to make improvements and add exciting new features. Your continued feedback and participation is what makes this lab a success! Thank you. Here’s what is new in the refresh of the Cloud Numerics Lab: Improved user experience: through more[...]

F# 3.0 is included as part of Visual Studio 2012 and comes with a gallery of community contributed online templates for F#. Time to explore! One online template is "F#/C# MVC 4" using ASP.NET Web API. Let's use this template to create a HTTP REST Web API which responds to requests as follows:     GET http://myhost.com/api/values  --> the JSON value    ["value1","value2"]     GET http://myhost.com/api/values/5  --> the JSON value    5     POST http://myhost.com/api/values  --> does nothing by default, but y[...]

Version 3.0 of the F#  language (which ships with Visual Studio 2012) has a number of new language features.  I expect that most people who follow F# are aware of the two big new language features: Type Providers and LINQ queries, which work together to help F# developers have great experiences working with Big Data.  However there are a few other new minor language features worth calling out that people may not be aware of.  In this blog post, I’ll describe four new minor features in the latest release of[...]

Training is an important part of adopting F# successfully in any large organization. There are several options for F# training currently available, but one recent addition is an online training course in F# by Pluralsight, authored by Oliver Sturm.  The material is available through a subscription -  details on subscriptions to this material can be found on the Pluralsight website. The sections and durations of the course are listed below, and in more detail on the Pluralsight website.     Introduction[...]